Who Took That Picture?

That's a question I've been asked whenever anyone sees The Poster. I never had a concept of what the poster would be. We had toyed around with a few ideas but nothing concrete. Christopher Grant Harvey, our DIT/Data Wrangler, had been collecting frame grabs from the shoot, and he would send them to me at the end of the day to view. Amongst them was this shot of Femi (Fabian Adeoye Lojede) as he walked through the pigeons. Of all the images, it seemed to capture one of the themes of the film: longing to be free. In that moment as the pigeons fly up past him, Femi is free. Months later, Hakeem kae-Kazim and I stood at the back of the cinema in Washington watching the film. Man On Ground was the opening night film at The Smithsonian African Art House Film Festival, and when the scene came up on screen, he leaned to me and whispered: “That should be the poster”. He was right. It was one of those images that the Film Gods had blessed us with.