Peace Chisom Aniakor is passionate about film and its power to help tackle the world’s most complex problems.
After graduating from the University of Abuja, Nigeria, with a first class degree in theatre arts, she shifted her focus to film, telling stories that champion both personal and communal growth.
Now a Mastercard Foundation Scholar studying Film and Screen Studies, she tells us what sparked her passion, how her time in Cambridge has changed the way she sees the world, and how film can be a force for good.
Has film always been an important part of your life?
I came to film later in life, but stories were always my thing.
Growing up, my dad had a large bookshelf filled with motivational, spiritual and some general educational books and always made my siblings and I read them. Like every other child all I wanted to do was play, and I had to figure out how to do both. The way I got through the books was searching out the stories in them. That was how I came to love stories and the many possibilities they held.
Through primary and secondary school, I spent a lot of time reading, writing and generally falling deeper in love with stories. Later, theatre struck me as a new but powerful way to tell them, so I studied that at university.
While there, film opened up a much larger world to me. It afforded me the opportunity to reach a bigger audience. This is where I focused after graduating, interning with production companies and learning more about screenwriting, directing, and editing.
I loved every bit of moving a story that only a few people could access to something everyone could watch and understand. Upon deciding to study a master’s in this digital world, it naturally followed that I would study film.
What made you decide to come to Cambridge for your master’s?
I grew up extremely inquisitive, I’ve always questioned everything. At undergrad level, most of my lecturers encouraged this, and for my master’s, I wanted to go somewhere where I could continue to question knowledge but on a much larger scale. Where I could say, ‘I don’t accept this’ and have the opportunity and encouragement to keep researching until I found the answer. The most important thing for me was a system that taught differently.
Not only is Cambridge a research institution where you are welcome to question things, but its mix of seminars and one-to-one supervision is designed to encourage and guide your curiosity.
Can you pinpoint the main thing you’ve learnt here that will make you a better director?
I now think about old things in new ways and have come to learn to read between the lines. I also better understand the significance of storytelling through props, scenery, setting, and even costume. Previously, these things seemed so small while dialogue and narrative took centre stage. Now, however, I have learned to tell better stories with fewer words.
Certainly, the projects I worked on before coming here would always mean something. But now I realise there were so many ways of making those films more impactful that I hadn’t been exploring.
Studying films from the past and present has also given me some grounding. It has helped me understand the way the world moves so that I can start to predict the kinds of stories that will be told in the future.
Film and society – they feed off each other. Films reflect what happens in society and society picks up on certain cues in films. And so, the circle continues. If you understand that, you start to see the potential of film in shaping perceptions of certain issues.
If you go back in time, you will find that many of the things that were considered crazy but are now normal first appeared in films. Similarly, some of the things we are currently watching in films that seem far-fetched will one day become normal. This is the power of films.
How can film be a force for good when it comes to driving sustainable change?
Where I’m from in Nigeria, sustainability is still a very strange subject to certain people, especially those outside the traditional classroom. To them, ‘sustainability’ is just a big word used by educated people; it is jargon that does not make sense to the regular person. I believe this is because it is not being broken down for easy comprehension.
One of the things I have learned is that you can make anything in the world make sense when it is part of a story. Every single thing. If you can form a picture in someone’s mind, then it begins to make sense.
I came across a short video on YouTube some time ago that has stayed with me. It flipped the world around, showing what things would be like if the world was designed solely for people with disabilities as opposed to non-disabled people.
In the video, someone asks a question but doesn’t understand the response as the other person is signing. Another struggles to walk down the road as the paths and crossings are made for wheelchair users. Imagine that!
No words were used but the message was clear – that the world is designed for a certain group of people and others are just left out, and that is a problem. I went down to the comments section of the video and saw that it had forced people to see the problems of accessibility and design differently.
This was a lightbulb moment. You can talk and talk but until you show people, or you describe something in a language they can understand, you're not making progress.
It's the same for sustainability. You can shout all you want about the problems that humans have created on the planet. You can speak all you want about technological developments and all the wonderful things that are being done, but unless you are giving people something they can connect with and using a language they understand, not everyone will hear you.
Why not make films that address the subject without even using the word ‘sustainability’? I believe this is very possible. Give it a storyline, talk about the things that we do that harm ourselves and destroy the environment for our children in the process.
I am not talking about a big-budget Marvel or Hollywood production – although I’m also not excluding the possibility of that – just something that people will connect with.
What’s next for you after you graduate this summer?
I’m currently working on a project about language and its role in globalisation, and cultural homogenisation - the flattening of the world into just one culture, one way of life, and one technologically charged world. I am working with young people to develop language content that has them asking certain questions, imagining certain scenarios, and generally connecting them to their language backgrounds. This is a project I hold dear and find so important. I believe the spice in the world, the colour that gives life its vibrance, is our diversity and ability to think and see the world differently.
I’m also open to collaborating on projects that reinvent how certain problems and solutions have been presented over time.
I am excited to put into practice all I have learned during this programme and look forward to telling these important stories differently and in better ways.