Ananze And The Zipman: Everything We Know About The Short Film Premiering This Sunday

‘Ananze And The Zipman’ is finally here, and we are very excited for you to see it. Amid the confusion caused by COVID-19, passion met idea and birthed a beautiful short film that will thrill you.

Ananze and The Zipman is a paranormal thriller that follows an unusual dibia/juju man (played by Chimezie Imo) who offers frightful gifts to his god, and a journalist (played by Uzoamaka Aniunoh) driven by pain to seek justice for the death of her loved ones.

What is the connection, you ask? You’ll have to watch the film to find out. What we can say is their encounter is fate, and their relationship is one that will go down in the books for all eternity.

The short film is written and directed by Gilbert Bassey, a filmmaker and graduate of the Multichoice Talent Factory (who earned the best student award and an opportunity to study at the New York Film Academy).

Now while we can’t tell you more about the movie storyline because of spoilers, we can tell you that it has something to do with a superhero, a native doctor, corruption, and revenge.

Beyond that though, we can also tell you a bit about how it came to be.

According to the producers (ALC Media), this film began when an idea to spin the walls of a room arrested the three founders during a meeting. From there, Gilbert Bassey (writer), adapted one of his old short scripts to meet the challenge. With the script settled, it came time to find the crew.

Due to their unusual idea and story, it was important to find the right crew.

It’s no surprise then that the film eventually got made by a crew of predominantly young Nigerians. For clarity, 90% of the people who made this film are under 30. Amazing!

Another exciting fact is that the crew had to build a rotating set for one of the sequences in the film. Production designer, Haruna Hassan said that the director insisted that the set be built because it was important to catch the spinning room effect in-camera.

Did we mention the tension-inducing fight scene? There’s a fight scene of epic proportions in the short film. To pull it off, the crew actually had to shoot it twice. According to the writer-director, Gilbert Bassey, the first fight sequence didn’t test well with early-watchers when the first cut of the film was assembled. As a result, they had to reshoot the fight sequence. This new fight sequence is what’s in the film and we can tell you that it was more than worth it. We couldn’t be more excited for you to see it.

A short film that has it all: drama, revenge, a little juju, action, and some pretty mind-blowing twists. Like Uzoamaka Aniunoh (actor) says, “it’s a short film, but it will blow your mind.”

It’s finally out this Sunday, December 20, 2020 and you can watch it for free via ALC Media’s social media pages. (note: the film will be available for free, but to watch it, you’ll have to subscribe to the company’s mailing list).