Screenwriter Brooks Eti-Inyene opens up about writing A Mama Deola Wedding Story, the hidden love story she fought to keep, and why Nollywood writers deserve more credit.
Some people find out they’ve made history before it happens. Brooks Eti-Inyene found out after.
She’s the woman behind “A Mama Deola Wedding Story,” and get this, it’s Africa’s very first Kava Original. Big deal, right? Well, funny thing is, while she was writing it, nobody told her that.
She just knew she was working on something big. The kind of project with a full cast of loud, funny, larger-than-life characters, the kind you’d normally split among a whole writers’ room. Brooks did it alone.
“I’ve been writing consistently for two years, but nothing this huge,” she said. It was only later, somewhere between draft after draft, that she pieced together this wasn’t going to some regular platform. “I didn’t know until much later, When I found out, I didn’t know how to react, honestly. I sit on my blessings long before I share them.”
Here’s the part that’ll surprise you, though. The film wasn’t supposed to be about two love stories.
Originally, it was just the young couple, the son and his fiancée, chasing their happy ending. But Brooks kept asking herself one question: what if their wedding pushed the estranged parents to fix things too?
That’s how Banjo and his wife got their own quiet, aching love story running underneath the wedding drama. “When you’re at a wedding, preparing for a marriage ceremony, you unconsciously reflect on your own love life,” she explained. It’s a small detail, but once you notice it, you can’t unsee it.
And honestly, that’s the whole point for Brooks, love, in all its messy, delusional, real forms. Not the fantasy version.
She’s refreshingly unbothered about the comments section too. She wrapped this script in June, and by the time it dropped in September, she’d already written three more features and two TV shows. “The reception, while appreciated, doesn’t define what kind of writer I am.”
But there’s one thing she won’t stay quiet about, how underpaid and underseen Nigerian screenwriters are. “You will not have a film without a writer,” she said, plainly. “I would never make peace with invisibility.”
She also thinks skit makers might quietly take over Nollywood within a decade, simply because they already have the audience and the money is starting to follow them there.
Whether that scares her or excites her? Somewhere in between, honestly. And that’s exactly the kind of honest, thoughtful writer Nollywood clearly needs more of.
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