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Take a powerful and compelling story about a family whose life is turned upside down when the matriach of the home is diagnosed with diabetes, and fuse it with the love for dance. What do you get? You get The Dance Movie Project, Nigeria/Africa’s first Afrobeat dance movie by emerging filmmaker Alexander ‘Lexx’ Ore.
The film which is in pre-production and will feature lawyer turned Nollywood A-list actress and comedian Funke Akindele, in its lead role, aims to raise an awareness of the number one deadly disease killing many Africans; while also encouraging a passion for the arts. Surprisingly, the disease killing millions of Africans is NOT HIV/AIDS but diabetes. Indeed, armed with mind blowing statistics on the amount of Africans that suffer from diabetes and a death toll that surpasses even that of HIV/AIDS, Lexx shares, on The Africa Music Law Show with Ms. Uduak, his journey to making the yet to be produced film, his current crowd funding efforts at Indiegogo.com to raise money for the film and the poor lifestyle and health choices of many Nigerians/Africans make which contributes to the diabetes epidemic on the continent.
It is a much needed conversation that aims to marry a passion for dance with a passion for helping youths; and having African parents recognize and nurture the creative talents in their children. Nigeria, the giant of Africa, has a strong dance culture (in 2006, a Nigerian group broke the Guiness book of records for the world’s longest dancing record with a time of 52 hours and 3 minutes), nevertheless, dance as a profession is still frowned upon. Equally frowned upon and worse, stigmatized, are persons who suffer any kind of illness, including diabetes.
Check out the informative and entertaining interview and please share!
