Toka McBaror Has a New Niger Delta Film. The Cast Alone Is a Statement of Intent.
Toka McBaror is making a Niger Delta drama called The Creek while Avante is still in cinemas. The cast so far: Bucci Franklin, Sunshine Rosman, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Sam Dede. No release date yet. NollyPrime is watching.
Film · Production
While Avante is still running in cinemas, Toka McBaror has another film coming. Details on The Creek have begun surfacing, and what has surfaced is enough to pay attention to.
The film is a Niger Delta drama. The director is McBaror, who has demonstrated across Avante and his earlier work a specific facility with sustained tension and physical environment — a filmmaker who understands that where a story is set should do active narrative work rather than sitting as backdrop. The Niger Delta as setting is not neutral territory in Nigerian storytelling. It carries the full weight of oil politics, community survival, ecological destruction, and the specific geography of creeks and rivers and illegal bunkering and everything that has been done to that region in the name of resources that largely left it without power or clean water. A drama set in that world, made by a filmmaker with McBaror’s instincts, has specific possibilities.
The cast confirmed so far: Bucci Franklin, Sunshine Rosman, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Sam Dede. Bucci Franklin is having the kind of year that follows a breakout — The Weekend at HBO Max, sustained critical attention, the credibility of a performer who has been working seriously and is now being taken seriously at the level his work has always warranted. Jimmy Jean-Louis, the Haitian actor whose work in international productions has been consistent and whose presence in a Nigerian production always signals a filmmaker thinking beyond the domestic market.
Sam Dede in a Niger Delta drama is a casting decision that carries its own history. He has played authority and corruption and the specific gravity of older men who know exactly what they have done and have decided to keep living with it. Whatever his character in The Creek is, it will not be simple.
No release date has been announced. No distributor has been named publicly. What exists is a production confirmed to be underway with a director whose previous film is in cinemas right now and a cast that suggests the material is being taken seriously from the first day of shooting.
NollyPrime will continue tracking The Creek as details emerge.
The Creek — in production. Dir. Toka McBaror · Starring Bucci Franklin, Sunshine Rosman, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Sam Dede · Niger Delta drama · Release date TBA.
