HOAYS Movie - Chimamanda Adichie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Genevieve Nnaji,and More at the TIFF and an early Review

Nigeria is representing with the movie adaptation of  Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun at the on-going Toronto International Film Festival. Arriving at the red capet for the premiere was the author herself among most of the major actors including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Genevieve Nnaji, Onyeka Onwenu, and John Boyega.

Enjoy the first photos and an excerpt from an early review below...

Here's a clip from Variety's review lauding Thandie Newton's performance as Olanna. I'm still seeing an Oscar nod :)

...it’s Newton’s Olanna who serves as our principal pair of eyes, her initially elevated social standing and dogged devotion to one dubiously deserving man making for a romantic riches-to-rags arc on which to hang her loved ones’ struggles.

The film opens in 1960, with Nigeria celebrating its newfound freedom from British rule, and Olanna and Kainene, daughters of a wealthy Igbo businessman in Lagos, newly returned from university in England. Kainene enters the family business; Olanna, to her family’s consternation, moves to Nsukka to live with Odenigbo, whom her sister snidely nicknames “the Revolutionary.” There, she attracts the scorn of Odenigbo’s traditionalist mother (Onyeka Onwenu); the tension between them symbolically foreshadows the class-clash faultlines creating social unrest throughout the country.

As clashes between the ruling Igbo class and the militant Hausa people first leave Lagos under military control and continue to flare up elsewhere, Olanna and Odenigbo are forced to flee Nsukka, heading eastwards to Biafra, the short-lived secessionist Igbo state founded in 1967. It won’t be their last panicked relocation. Meanwhile, sundry personal betrayals and infidelities repeatedly recast Olanna’s relationship both to her boyfriend and her sister.

Given its sheer amount of incident, this geographically restless story can hardly fail to engross even in attenuated form, particularly with Newton at the top of her game as Olanna, a woman whose unhidden intelligence is nonetheless often at war with her more impractical passions. The actress smartly makes Olanna work for her likeability over the course of the film; her best scenes come opposite the wonderful, similarly watchful Rose, both actresses convincingly etching the unspoken understanding that can make and break a sisterly relationship.

Photos by Jerod Harris/Getty Images