Dreamers director Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor: "In cinema, after you come out, it's like you stop existing"

With her directorial debut Dreamers having premiered at London Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, as well as having spoken at multiple pre-release screenings of the film, you'd think that Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor may have possibly tired a little talking about her movie.

Sure, she jokes that she'd love to sleep after its release, but it's abundantly clear that she's beaming with happiness and gratitude at just being able to make a film like this one.

Dreamers is Gharoro-Akpojotor's feature film debut, which she has also written, and is a semi-autobiographical story that is underpinned by love. The film follows Isio (Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo), a Nigerian woman who is detained after living undocumented in the UK for two years. She is remanded at Hatchworth Removal Centre and there, meets Farah (Ann Akinjirin) who keeps her spirits high as the possibility of her asylum pleas being rejected looms.

Isio is seeking asylum in the UK because there is a very real threat of danger if she were to return to Nigeria, something that Gharoro-Akpojotor had similar experiences of. While at the crux of Dreamers is very much a love story, it still must be hard to bare your soul on the big screen like this, I remark.

"I watch the film sometimes and I'm very proud and happy because for me, it's a part of my life that made me a whole lot stronger," Gharoro-Akpojotor tells me.

"I went through so much therapy in the process, during the filming. Not everything in the film happened to me but some things could've. The scene where Isio's with the case worker talking, it was much longer before, but that scene is verbatim what happened in my session.

"When the guy at the end asks, 'How do I know you're gay?', that's the same thing that my guy said to me at the end. Making it and going through the emotions everyday, it becomes different, it reminds you where you've been but also how much I've grown. There were times on set that were very intense and I asked myself, 'Why am I doing this?' but that's what therapy's for."

The director adds: "The journey of Isio freeing her mind or realising her own voice, I think that was my journey of having to learn that immigration doesn't have to define you."

Although Gharoro-Akpojotor has been doing the screening circuit throughout various points of the year now, the prospect of the film being released to the public brings its own unique set of emotions.

"I'm excited but also scared because it's a film that I hope a lot of people see," she says. "But also, it's a film that I want to challenge people, but the scary part is that you want people to engage in their love story and the immigration of it. I think it's the second Black lesbian film in cinemas in the UK.

"For me, that's a big deal just in terms of representation on so many levels. I'm excited about that but I'm also like 'are people going to go and watch it because of that?'. At the same time, I think people should watch it for that, if anything."

When Gharoro-Akpojotor learnt that Dreamers fell into such a small statistic, how did that make the debut director feel? "It's wild. There are some stats that you never think about until somebody tells you. We made the film and knew 'They're queer, Black, it's about immigration' but that was it.

"Then someone who I work with had done some research for something else and had said he'd been looking for Black lesbian films out of the UK and he could only find Stud Life. That was over 20 years ago.

"We come from a period where people talk about diversity in film and TV, we talk about making a difference and then you suddenly realise it's a surface level thing. In my mind, you look at Black cinema for instance and you see the lack of."

The founder of Joi Productions, Gharoro-Akpojotor is in a better position than most to know what's actually being done to further representation within UK cinema right now. That being said, the director and producer is clear that there's still more that needs to be done. "I made Blue Story, I made Boxing Day. I look at the landscape and there hasn't been a lot of Black cinema anyway that people can go 'Let me go see myself in it'.

"Then you look at queer cinema separately, there's not a lot of queer cinema in the UK and that's just before getting to being a Black woman. The things that frustrate me the most is when people are like 'Oh, maybe you haven't got audiences for your film' but I think the issue is that maybe you don't know how to market to these audiences. So therefore, you don't even want to put money behind marketing for these audiences to go and watch the film."

She adds: "When I first found out about [that statistic], I was quite shocked because I didn't realise how terrible the stats were, just around queerness and Black queerness on screen. Part of the reason why I got into films was just because I wanted to see myself on screen."

Around the age of 19, Gharoro-Akpojotor was on a mission to find just that as a film fan. She wanted to find films that could speak to her sexuality, race and also being from Nigeria. She wasn't looking for these films purely for her own amusement, it was also in a bid to help her come out to her mother at the time. "I was trying to gather research and see how [these characters] did it," she laughs but admits that every film she managed to find was American with nothing from the UK.

Through her work as a producer and now, as a feature film director and writer, Gharoro-Akpojotor is hoping to change all of that – but it's no easy feat. She's unashamed in the fact that she wants to create work that shows people that their stories matter, with that being one of the reasons why she went into filmmaking in the first place.

"It's nice to be part of that representation and growing the catalogue but it's also terrible that ... there's nothing. It's awful," she says, reflecting on Dreamers space in the somewhat non-existent queer Black cinema strand coming out of the UK.

When Dreamers was screened at an event in Ghana, a man accosted Gharoro-Akpojotor in the audience Q&A asking whether the film was "pushing the gay agenda in Africa". He'd said that if it went to National Film Board in Ghana then it would be deemed illegal, seeing as the country had just last year passed a bill making identifying as LGBTQ+ illegal.

The moderator had said that Gharoro-Akpojotor didn't have to answer but she wanted to, saying that it was a good conversation to have. "I'm not pushing an agenda, I'm just showing people that it exists," the director says as she reflects on how she answered at the time. "What you choose to do with that information is really up to you. This film cannot make you gay. But why are you so concerned with what everyone is doing in their bedrooms?"

While that's just one negative instance of some heckling from the sidelines (although it turns out that the man in question loved Dreamers), one of the best things Gharoro-Akpojotor has been confronted with after screenings are audience members beaming and saying "I saw myself on screen, thank you". But also, a glaringly obvious undercurrent that has come out of the film being screened is the fact that one of the topic's explored in the film is still something that many don't know a lot about.

"What I've realised taking the film around is that a lot of people don't know anything about immigration," Gharoro-Akpojotor tells me. She describes a woman in one of the screenings who acknowledged her own privilege before asking the director how exactly someone becomes an illegal immigrant.

"She had no idea how you could. Immigration is something where people are like, 'Oh immigrants' but there's no explanation, you don't understand the complexities of the immigration system," Gharoro-Akpojotor says. But she welcomes those questions because that's the point of the film, she explains. "Maybe people will begin to question the rhetorics around immigration or even just question their own belief as to what immigration is and who immigrants are."

We joke rather than despair over the fact that when you add on levels of intersections within one's identity, it only lessens the probability of seeing your stories reflected on the big screen these days. But why is it so hard to bring a breadth of diverse storytelling to life in UK cinema?

"I think, for me, I find that there's an unconscious bias. I don't think a lot of people realise that they're doing it. One thing we do at Joi Productions is we say we're Black, queer, female-led and everything in between. But when you come to us, you don't have to sell your Blackness or your queerness. We encourage the fact that we don't need to explain to audiences that this is a queer character or this is a Black character.

"In Dreamers, I made a point that they never come out to each other, they just fall in love and that's it. When you live the experience, you just are. I got tired of seeing so many coming out stories because after you come out, in cinema, it's like you just stop existing. It's like I'm out... but you don't live."

Gharoro-Akpojotor continues: "I think sometimes with the people in power... when it comes to you being a person of colour or a person from an underrepresented group, if the person you're speaking to doesn't understand that, they ask you to dig deeper into whatever experience you have in order for them to understand.

"Whereas if you're in a room and everyone there has different lived experiences, they wouldn't be asking you to explain 'What does it mean to be queer? What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to be working class?'. They would accept that it just is what it is. It's more about the story, less about the identity of the person. I think a lot of times in cinema, people spend more time wanting you to explain why you do A, B, C, D as a Black person. A lot of writers get frustrated."

It's that process of explanation that can often be drawn out and take away a sense of creative freedom for many budding writers from underrepresented backgrounds. "When you think of any other film with 'insert white man', it just happens. My man is just living in the woods, assassin, we don't need to know how he got there," Gharoro-Akpojotor laughs.

"Why does he live there? Is there a shower? But there's never questions about his trauma or what led him there. He's just there. Then you insert a Black man and it's like 'Why is he there? What led him there?'. But I think that's a very unconscious thing where [if] you don't understand the other person, you spend more time trying to understand. Sometimes people conflate understanding character with understanding the character's backstory or experience for them to find a way for them to relate."

While we laugh about assassins in trees, Gharoro-Akpojotor does reflect on the fact that this very instance rings true for Dreamers. "There was a producer years ago when I first was doing Dreamers, he was like 'I'm more interested in their story of coming to the UK, what was that journey and what did they have to fight for?'.

"That's because you're so used to hearing these painful, traumatic stories – go and read the paper, you'll find those stories, it's nothing new. I'm trying to tell a story of women and they're just in a place where they have to survive but that was hard for him to understand. 'How do you make me feel for them if you don't show their pain?' but again, with the man in the forest, you're not going 'Where's his trauma?'."

Gharoro-Akpojotor continues: "In the film, I didn't talk about immigration, I spoke about it twice and that was a conscious decision. If you feel that at the end of the film that she should've got out, more should've happened or you're angry at the system then good. That's many people's lives. Many people that you know nothing about because you've never bothered to think who are these people and what are they going through."

While the director has crafted a film that is very much centred on love, it does obviously also shine a light on the asylum process in the UK. How has it been fielding questions about immigration as if she's the sole beacon of information on it?

"I always tell people that I have no solution, I know nothing but I do really believe that we as individuals have choices that we can make. Our choices affect policies. If we want any sort of real change, we have to make different choices. The thing about immigration is that it's such low-hanging fruit ... it's something the government uses all the time," she says.

Gharoro-Akpojotor tells me that living in Dagenham 20 years ago, it was the rise of the British National Party and the English Defence League. Then, the rhetoric was that people are "coming over and taking our jobs", she says, "but 20 years later, we're still having the same conversations. Why are we? What is it about immigration that means you can't get a job?"

"These asylum hotels you're protesting outside, nobody just turns up and checks in for two weeks, they got put there. The people who are coming, I think sometimes we forget to think about why they're coming, where they're coming from, what situation they're running from. But also, we should stop framing immigrants in that way because expats do the same thing – they go somewhere for a better life, for sunshine in Spain or wherever it is.

"The only difference is there's an economic differentiation because when you're an expat, you've got a bit of money, you can buy a house. When you're an immigrant coming over, the assumption is that you're very poor, you have nothing so therefore, you can't contribute. When in reality, people who come in seeking asylum used to be doctors, accountants, teachers, have all these skills that we don't bother to think about."

Releasing the film at this time when those tensions are seemingly at fever pitch is part of the scariness of Dreamers coming out, Gharoro-Akpojotor tells me.

"The people I really want to watch the film are people who I want to be engaged with the immigration aspect of it too. I want the gays to go and watch it, I want women to go and watch it, people of any colour to go and watch it. Also, people who wouldn't normally watch a film about immigration and have their own questions."

As for the future, Gharoro-Akpojotor is looking to adapt Diana Evans's Ordinary People which is "a beautiful, poetic unromantic romance" that follows two middle-class Black couples in Crystal Palace. "It's all about an affair that saves a marriage. It's adult and different to Dreamers but still soft."

She continues: "I have a thing where I'm like 'How can we expand Black cinema and it's not just in the hood or it's not just solely based on your culture?' It's just about people with lives and things that we all experience in life. That's one of the things I'm very passionate about, the expansion of Blackness in genre – horror, action, romance because I don't think we have enough of that. I want to see more Blackness across the board, in every shape and form."

Gharoro-Akpojotor is also serving as producer on Ashley Walters's Animol, which is his feature film directorial debut. "This man doesn't sleep," she laughs as we speak briefly about the post-Adolescence haze that has been 2025 for him.

"He's always making Animol a priority. It's been actually quite a wild time but I'm very excited, I can't wait for people to see it because it's so beautiful, it's very unexpected from him and I think it will really announce him as a voice that people should listen to visually, creatively. I don't think people are going to expect what the film is going to do."

For Gharoro-Akpojotor though, the future continues to beam bright as she confidently assures me that she'll continue doing all three – producing, writing and directing – going forward. In America, they seem to do it all, she says, so why not over here too?

"I have stories to tell and I feel like I should be able to tell them. In the UK, we're so used to putting people in boxes but what happens when we just take them away?"

Dreamers is in cinemas from Friday 5th December.

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