How I nearly died because of my award-winning film – Peter Igho
Years later when I was in Jos producing Cockcrow at Dawn, Julie Coker one of NTA’s staff, came to me in Jos to say there is a competition called URTNA awards coming up in Tunisia and NTA had not entered and the DG had directed that NTA must enter and had given an assignment to […]
Years later when I was in Jos producing Cockcrow at Dawn, Julie Coker one of NTA’s staff, came to me in Jos to say there is a competition called URTNA awards coming up in Tunisia and NTA had not entered and the DG had directed that NTA must enter and had given an assignment to make sure that she got a programme. She looked around and she realized that the best entry to go would be my film and I said okay but why don’t you get the copy in the library and she said they looked around and couldn’t find the copy. The copy they found was not good and so they needed a clean good copy and couldn’t find any and they had only one week before they close the entry.”
Igho then said to her: “Why are you coming to me one week to the close of the entry?” To which she said she didn’t want to but then she had no choice. Igho continued: “She then told me that I must do it for her and I said fine, come back tomorrow. So I went back that night and rewrote it because I didn’t have a copy of the script. I wrote from memory again and the next day I got the cast together. Sadiq was already in cock craw at dawn where he played the part of a doctor. Larai was the wife of the Alhaji in the film. In three nights, working day and night, I re-shot the play again and put it together and booked an editing place in London because then we didn’t have editing facilities here.”
Igho said he then got Matt Dadzie to follow him in the car to Kano to get a flight to London. “On the way to Kano, the car crashed and the whole thing was in pieces. The driver had a broken pelvis and was bleeding while the third didn’t seem to have any injury but was shouting “my tapes, my tapes” as if he had gone mad. They were trying to hold him but he kept on shouting. Clearly that was me,” Igho told Trust Entertainment, laughing.
Igho’s own interest was in the tapes he had suffered to make. “I collected the five tapes and refused to move from there until a vehicle was brought to take us to the hospital. We got to the hospital and I had looked at myself previously and saw that there were no injuries and I said thank God and I started consoling the other occupants who had injuries. When we got to the hospital it was then we realized that I had injuries on my back, as it was all bloody. At the hospital they said the doctors and nurses were on strike, so it was the ward servant that came and said there was no doctor or nurse and we were bleeding and needed to be stitched. He asked us if we minded being stitched with no anesthesia. We had no choice, so we sat down in the corridor and she brought iodine and spirit and cleaned up the wounds with antiseptics, stitched us out there with no anesthesia.”
Igho and co. pleaded with her to look after the driver and she treated Matt Dadzie the same way and from there the group took off to the airport. “So I had to sit sideways because my back was all stitched, till we got to London. From the airport, I went straight to the editing room and worked all through the day and night. We finished early hours of the next morning and collected the master tape and stayed back in the airport to fly to Algiers.”
It was the closing day, and by the time they got there, it was late afternoon. “Somehow God made a way for me to still submit my entry and eventually we came first. All the pain and all the tears were made up for by the award even though we almost lost our lives. Most times, people don’t see the blood and tears that producers go through, they just see what they see. But that is just one of the experiences we had.”