I want Relentless to also be a mirror for African society to look at itself, criticise itself, and celebrate itself.

I am making this film so that Africans would love it and be challenged by it. The world hopefully would follow. I want anybody in the world to identify with the characters and emotions in the film.

Africans are believers and we somehow believe a hero will come and save us, he’s not shown up and the present African generation is still looking for the new Nkrumah’s, Mandela’s, people with vision and clarity of thought. Hard to produce in refugee camps, running under fire in a world of kid soldiers. — Director, Andy Amadi Okoroafor.

Watch the teaser »

Relentless is a love story, a story about war, loneliness, and the workings of the human soul. It is a simple story of ordinary people finding themselves in extra ordinary situations, acting out their destiny.

It is not a political story but it is about the effects of war and thus the backdrop is a component to the film, but not the hero.

Though set in Freetown Sierra Leone and Lagos Nigeria, the story could easily have been anywhere in Africa; Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Congo, Rwanda; It is an African story, but also a universal tale. An African story in its landscape and particular circumstances, but a universal story in its characters, its heart and theme.

Relentless deals with the consequence of wars on the psyche of the contemporary African. From Rwanda (genocide), the Congo (the African world war), Burundi (ethnic struggle for power) to Cote d’Ivoire and Darfur. Wars with different ramifications, and brutality, Liberia and later Sierra Leone was at the vanguard of these brutal conflicts of which the Biafran war into which our hero Obi was born is one the first in a long list of conflicts that has distorted Africa.

More about Relentless.

The film has the ambition of exploring Africa beyond the news headlines, sound bites and statistics. It is about looking at Africa from a contemporary point of view. It’s about the little people; the ones nobody reports after the satellite transmission dishes have been folded and moved to another cliché.

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