Mother of George is a 2013 Nigerian-American film. It is filmed in and focuses on Brooklyn’s Nigerian-American community, an immigrant community large enough to retain a cultural enclave that can be all inclusive to its members, enabling them to live lives of various mixtures of Nigerian and American styles. The story focuses on Ade and Ayo, two Nigerians very much in love, Ayo’s mother and brother, and Ade’s best friend Sade. Ayo owns a Nigerian restaurant in the midst of Brooklyn’s Nigerian community; his brother works with him,
The film opens with a wonderful Nigerian commitment ceremony — as rich, vibrant and absorbing as any ceremony I’ve seen on film. There’s music, dancing, gatherings by gender, blessings by elders — including the assurance to Ade of her fecundity, and that her first child will be a boy, to be named George. (Hence the title.)
Ade doesn’t get pregnant throughout the first couple of years, and this leads to various complications that form the heart of the movie. Simultaneous themes deal with compromises forced by living in the two cultures, the stresses and burdens of crossing real or imagined cultural limits, and the struggles of keeping one’s true self.
It’s a low budget Indie film, with much unevenness. But for its capture of Nigeria in America, of cross-cultural and intra-cultural stress, of love vs, tradition, it’s well worth seeing.