The Toronto Film Festival will have the world premiere of Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman.
The book “Death and the Kings Horseman” by Wole Soyinka, which is based on the 1943 Nigerian historical incident, was adapted into “Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman.”
Tradition dictates that the monarch’s horseman in this story, which is set in the Oyo Empire, commit ceremonial suicide and then follow the dead king to the afterlife.
Distracted by sensual pleasures, he got into a terrible fight with the British government, which made his spirit roam the earth and portended catastrophe for the country and its residents.
The director of the Netflix movie, Biyi Bandele, recently passed away.
Biyi worked with such ease in the approach and manner that he went about directing, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey noted when discussing his passing with a media outlet. We will miss it, as well as the way he was able to comprehend Yoruba culture, our customs, and those subtleties that make Nigeria genuinely Nigerian.
According to the director’s note for the film, Wole Soyinka’s “Death and the King’s Horseman” was so deeply and completely Yoruba in its original form that translating it into English was “the only option to make the picture immediately accessible to a global audience.”
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