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Maitama
| Maitama | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Tuni Tangaza |
| Written by | Tuni Tangaza Tomás Mijinyawa |
| Based on | L'euphorie by Tomás Mijinyawa |
| Produced by | Sule Gwani |
| Starring | Atiku Mangou Haruna Lamine Amina Zaria |
| Cinematography | Danladi Choge |
| Edited by | Sammako Dauda |
| Music by | Sahura Garba |
Release dates |
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Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country |  Kitaubani |
| Languages | Hausa X |
Maitama is a 2023 Kitauban biographical drama film about the life of purported faith healer/con artist Alhaji Nuruddeen Maitama. Directed by female director Tuni Tangaza, it features longtime actor Atiku Mangou as Maitama, and follows the latter's rise and fall in a non-chronological format. The film was largely produced through funds procured by Tangaza's own production company and through her personal influence in the world of cinema.
The film borrowed heavily from Paretian-born Kitauban journalist Tomás Mijinyawa's 1994 exposé L'euphorie. This book was widely credited with bringing accusations of Maitama's fraud to worldwide attention, eventually leading to his arrest; as a result, Mijinyawa served as both a consultant and a writer during production. As Mijinyawa was at one time a personal confidant of Maitama, the film intimately explores the psyche of Maitama, and frames the discussion around his mission as a question of motivation; that is, whether Maitama was a fraud or merely deluded. As a result, the film explores themes of mental illness and its stigmas in Kitauban society, deception, faith, sectarianism, and the wider socio-political context of Kitaubani in the 1990s, during the time when Maitama came to prominence. The film mixes realistic and surrealistic visuals in order to either make the thought processes of Maitama more relatable to viewers or portray some of his claims as so absurd as to be fabricated for the sole purpose of deception. The film has been noted to resemble the conventions of a music biopic, as it portrays similarities between Maitama's fame and the popularity cycle of celebrity musicians.
Plot
The film opens in 1996, on Maitama (Atiku Mangou) being incarcerated at Gashi's notorious Department XII Prison following his murder conviction. The prison bus is slow to enter the prison grounds; throngs of people choke the street in front. The crowd is divided: on one side stand the remaining faithful, a smaller crowd than Maitama's detractors but nonetheless equally vigorous and loud in their protestations. At times, the bus is even rocked by protestors and counterprotestors alike. Inside the bus, the guards flanking Maitama are sat unusually far from him; it is unclear to the audience whether it is out of disgust or reverence. Maitama maintains an aloof, vacant smile with slightly upturned eyes throughout, even while being booked in the prison and tossed unceremoniously into an empty cell. After surveying the cell, Maitama discovers a set of glyphic marks on the stone brick wall. Tracing his fingers over each glyph, Maitama briefly relives moments from his tumultuous childhood in the rural Sule Department. Visions of hardship and joy overlap, steadily becoming more and more visible on the screen until they appear as if they were projected onto the wall in front of Maitama.
Eventually, Maitama finds the implement with which the glyphs were made, and decides to carve his own. As he begins, the first of the film's many breaks with reality happens as the implement breaks through the wall (previously implied to be several inches thick) to reveal a scene from Maitama's life: the younger Maitama struggling to escape a brush fire. The current Maitama watches his younger self struggle to find shelter from the flames. Eventually, the older Maitama rushes forth to help the younger escape; from the latter's perspective, the former resembles his deceased father, and assumes that his ancestral spirit had come to guide him to safety. (In reality, this event was cited by Maitama as the inciting incident for his ministry.)