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• Cannes 2015 (Line up)

Year of production : 2015

Director(s) : Anthony ONAH
Writer(s) : Anthony ONAH
Cast : Aml AMEEN, Lennie JAMES, Matt LAURIA

Producer(s) : Justin BEGNAUD, Kishori RAJAN, Daniel DAVILA

Seyi Ogunde is the American son of Nigerian immigrants who live outside New York City. With single- minded focus, he’s attended a prestigious college and landed a competitive finance job. He’s both confident in his abilities and deeply insecure because of his African background. While he contends with a life and career in New York, Seyi grapples with a turbulent family situation in Hackensack, New Jersey: his stroke-ridden father dreams of a return to Nigeria, his mother slaves as a nurse to help keep the home afloat, and his sister struggles to care for their infirm parent. Hovering over these family difficulties is a painful past incident that goes largely unconfronted.

Seyi only endures the strain of work and family with the assistance of illegally acquired prescription drugs – and his dependence is deepening. Adding to this cocktail, Seyi meets Liz, a girl whose well-to- do background leads him to believe he must embellish his own in order to win her over. He makes large expenditures while courting her – cutting into his finances and forcing him to renege on promised assistance to his family. Dead set on both impressing Liz and fulfilling his family obligations, Seyi soon finds himself sliding into a highly fraudulent financial scheme – one that props up his short-term earnings but also leaves him at great risk.

As Seyi’s choices play out, he finds his life quickly spiraling out of control: the law pursues him because of his financial dealings; Liz discovers he’s not exactly who he’s claimed to be; and his prescription drug dependence grows stronger, ultimately landing him in the hospital. Everything comes to a head when his sick father suffers a second large stroke and the devastating family secret comes out into the open. With Seyi’s relationships pulled apart and the Feds bearing down on him and his firm, Seyi is forced to fully examine his choices – ultimately making a decision that will alter the course of his young life.

DARA JU is the story of a young Nigerian-American man’s struggle with who he should be and how he might live a life with meaning, simultaneously relating an often untold strain of the contemporary African experience abroad.