Uzo

"Not to be confused with Uzo Candybabe (Maria Uzoaku Egwu), a Nigerian-born madam who frequently appeared on "The Howard Stern Show"."

Uzo is a Nigerian-born American filmmaker, born in August, 1957. His production company is called Cold Grey Entertainment. Intitially based in Patchogue, New York, he is now based in Jamaica, Queens. Thus far, he has made two feature films, "Walls & Bridges" (1992) and "Better Than Ever" (1997). After losing the option on the novel, "Mendel's Dwarf", after many years of work, he is currently working on a third film. A professional graphic artist, he is the founder of the Devo clothing line, which has now been phased into a shoe line.

While his films deal signficantly with race relations, the issue of race is never dealt with on the surface.

Uzo is an Igbo, the son of a bookseller and a nurse. His mother died in childbirth when he was twelve years old due to poor medical attention due to the expenditure of resources on the Biafran War, after which he and two siblings were raised solely by his father. He studied graphic design at the University of Nigeria, then studied photography, first at Howard University and then the Brooks Institute of Photography. His interst in film was cultivated primarily by melodramatic films from India that were popular in Nigeria during his youth.

"Walls & Bridges" is the story of a white nun who leaves her order to marry a black artist who is blinded in an act of violence. the film premiered October 14, 1992, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It was one of two films from the United States represented at the sixth Festival of the Americas, sponsored by the Organization of American States and the American Film Institute. He is considered the first African-born person to direct an American feature film.

His second film, shot under the title "Cul-de-Sac", was released by Water Bearer Films in a shortened version under the title "Better Than Ever", presumably to avoid confusion with the cult classic by Roman Polanski. Described as "Grumpy Old Men" meets "Home Alone", the film stars William Hickey, Carl Gordon, Victor Colicchio, Frank Gorshin, Donald McDonald, Sylva Gassel, Irma St. Paule, Pee Wee Love, and the acting debut of Joey Buttafuoco.

He then struggled for years on an adaptation of Simon Mawer's 1999 novel, "Mendel's Dwarf". After years of preproduction hell, the option was sold to Barbra Streisand's company.

He does not consider himself a writer, and each of his films has been written by someone else based on his initial concepts. After writing and rewriting the script, for "Walls & Bridges", he hired Michael Edelson, then a film professor at SUNY Stony Brook to write the finished screenplay. Howard Fine, Alan Fine, and producer Anthony Breccia wrote "Better Than Ever" based on his story, and he had another writer on "Mendel's Dwarf", again after agonizing on several scripts of his own. Most recently, he has consulted with up-and-coming playwright Scott Andrew Hutchins to script his third film. He prefers to keep his films simple, straightforward, and unmanipulative, "in the European style."

His work has been criticized by young black filmmakers for its idealism, as well as for his political conservatism, but he finds his approach truthful, and the interracial relationships depicted in his films true to his own experience and of others he knows in such relationships.

References

*Marjorie Kaufman. "Nigerian Emigre Makes 'Colorblind' Movie Set on the Island." "The New York Times", January 3, 1993. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE4D71E3AF930A35752C0A965958260

External links

* [http://www.devostore.com Devo Store]