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Every life is a story.

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Rahman Oladigbolu was coming out of a seven-year illness when he moved to

Massachusetts to start a new life. Continuing to pursue his adolescent dream of

becoming a filmmaker, he started out in Boston as a production assistant on films and

television shows. He participated in group-produced experimental short films as writer,

director, and co-producer to find his place in the motion picture industry. As a liberal

arts/psychology student and a peer tutor/teacher’s assistant at Quincy College, Rahman

sought further film training under the private tutelage of film professor Howard Phillips

at the Center for Digital Imaging and Animation school, CDIA, an affiliate of Boston

University. Before he embarked on his first feature film, Rahman published a memoir of

his long-term illness, On Holy Pilgrimage: A Long Journey For Freedom, which details

his transformative experience of coming to America against all odds to learn filmmaking.

While furthering his education at Harvard University, and working as a mental health

assistant with teenagers and young adults with autism, Rahman developed his first film

project. He completed the script during his nightshifts and produced it like a series of

short films that would become the narrative feature Soul Sisters. The film tells the story

of friendship between a Nigerian young woman, faced with unexpected challenges as an

undocumented immigrant in the United States, and an African American young woman

searching for her identity as a black woman in America.

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Soul Sisters went ahead to win the “Best Emerging Filmmaker Award" at the Roxbury

International Film Festival and "The Artist Award" at the American Islamic Congress, a

multicultural and inter-faith organization headquartered in Washington DC. Released

across Africa as “In America: The Story of the Soul Sisters,” the film also won the

award for “Best Film by an African Abroad” at the African Movie Academy Award

(AMAA). It has been screened at film festivals and cultural institutes around the world,

including the Cannes' Pan-African Film festival and the Werkstatt Der Kuturen institute

in Germany. As one of the pioneering group of African films produced in America (it’s

the first Nigerian film produced in Massachusetts), Soul Sisters is one of the subjects in a

PhD-thesis-to-book that explores the unfolding African narratives both as an on-screen

and real life phenomena in the United States.

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The stories of Rahman’s college friends became his second feature film. Titled Theory of

Conflict, the film follows a diverse group of students confronted with conflicts that erupt

between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students on a Boston area college campus.

According to him, making Theory of Conflict has been one of the most traumatic

experiences of his life, “second only to the experience of my 7-year illness,” as he stated.

Hence, the development stage for his next film, tentatively titled A Private Experience,

has presented itself as a stage of succor from the challenges of the past few years. An

adaptation of the story “A Private Experience” written by the New York Times

bestselling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the story follows the experiences of two

Nigerian young women, from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, trapped

together in a small shop during an ethnic-religious violence in the city of Kano.