So far, Charles Okpaleke‘s footprint in Nollywood has shown that Nigeria is a grapevine of stories and he’s committed to telling them. In his latest creative pursuit via his production outfit Play Network Studios, the filmmaker is looking to make a film based on the plane hijack incident of October 25, 1993, where four teenage boys hijacked a Nigeria Airways aircraft flying from Lagos to Abuja and diverted it to Niamey in Niger Republic.
As a form of protest on the heels of the unjust annulment of the June 12, 1993 general election by the Ibrahim Babagandia administration, the incident grabbed news headlines locally and internationally. Okpaleke made the announcement on his Instagram recently.
”In line with our commitment to tell our Nigerian stories, my research and writing team at the @playnetworkstudios have been working on an amazing storyline for a few months now that is centered around the 1993 hijack of the Nigerian Airways,” Okpaleke wrote.
“The preliminary plot I have just been sent is AMAZING! We are still reaching out to key participants of that hijack to share with us, a more in-depth account of their first hand participation!”
Although the teenagers were captured and served a jail sentence of nine years in Niger, the objective was to compel the Nigerian government to re-install MKO Abiola as the winner of the general elections in 1993. For Okpaleke, the film could serve as a soft portrayal of Abiola’s political amibitions while interspersed with the incident of the hijack.
Other announced projects from Okpaleke are still in the pipeline, like the biopic of 90’s notorious criminal Shina Rambo and a Jaja of Opobo biopic.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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