Writer and Director: Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor
Even the sublime presence of Ronkę Adékoluęjo can’t disguise the melodrama in Dreamers, a BBC and Quiddity film about two queer Nigerian women being held in a migrant detention centre. What could be a gritty social realism film about asylum seekers in Britain today is ultimately a little slushy with nods to 1963’s The Great Escape.
Adékoluęjo is Isio, a woman who has been caught working illegally in London. Dreamers begins with her first day at the detention centre, a converted suburban house. She’s to share a room with another Nigerian woman, Farah (impeccably played by Ann Akinjirin). Farah tells Isio that the first few days are the hardest, but that shouldn’t discourage her from applying for asylum. If asylum is denied, then Isio will have the opportunity to appeal three times. Farah suggests that Isio’s asylum will be denied, at least at first, as the Home Office authorities want to make sure that every applicant is truly desperate to stay in the country.
Farah is awaiting the decision of her final appeal. If she’s not successful, she will be deported immediately. Isio hears the screams of another woman as she is bundled away by the guards. As Farah has advised, the first few days are terrible for Isio when she quickly makes enemies of the other women being held in the centre.
Isio has fled Nigeria because her family found out that she is a lesbian. Her mother locked her in a room where she was a victim of ‘corrective rape’ by four men. The Home Office official who interviews Isio is brutally unsympathetic as he asks her about her sexual orientation.
Despite or because of their differences – Isio has a degree in Finance while Farah is more interested in the arts – the two women begin to have a sexual relationship, which, because of the environment and the threat of possible separation, soon turns passionate and urgent. Perhaps the only sure way that they can stay together is by escaping.
Alongside Adékoluęjo and Akinjirin are Diana Yekinni, playing the mighty Nana, and Aiysha Hart as Atefeh, from Iraq. The four women deliver sterling performances, especially Yekinni as the Ghanian Nana, who dislikes all people and is abused by a male guard. But rather than hardships, writer and director Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor is keen to show the friendship and loyalty between the women, best seen when Farah cooks a Nigerian jollof to rival that of Nana’s.
In a film that lasts less than 80 minutes, the ending seems rushed, unlikely and too dramatic. But at a time when protests are being held outside such detention centres, Dreamers is important in showing that asylum seekers are real people and not the drivers of a movement to make the country un-British, as Reform would like to tell us.
Dreamers is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8 – 19 October.
