Ifeyinwa Arinze Won A Locarno Residency. It’s Only the Beginning – Film Efiko

Ify Arinze had no plan to go into filmmaking. At least initially. Born to a dad who passed on early and a mum who worked in immigration, she left Lagos for the US in 2010, planning to study biochemistry—“just like Ben Carson”—and on to med school. Her plan was similar to the plans of many immigrants before her: she wanted to “make my family proud”.

Somehow, she discovered neuroscience and decided to study it at a college for women. That became her first degree not biochemistry. Outside of class, she discovered photography and got good enough to get gigs to cover weddings. When she graduated, she took up a job at the University of Massachusetts and then moved to Michigan. At this point, medicine remained in her future but again, something else intervened: she wanted to go to film school. Unlike the move biochemistry to neuroscience, the move to film had to be trickier, so she spoke to a few people in her orbit who had made the tranistion. These were mainly engineers. Subsequently, she found out that she needed to submit a video sample as part of her application. 

Arinze arranged a ragtag crew of friends to make a short film. “It was very DIY,” she says over Google Meet. “YouTube was my teacher.”

The result of that hustle was “Cooking with My Mum”, the story of a girl who has forgotten how to cook jollof rice and has to reach out to her mum for help ahead of hosting a party at her new home. The first-time director loved the experience and decided to do another short. She put both films in her applications to five schools, NYU and Columbia in Chicago among them. “I didn’t have too high expectations,” she says. “I was just proud of myself of having done it.”

Well, low expectations be damned. She got offers from both Columbia and NYU. “It felt like validation,” she says….