Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

Cafe Aphra contributor, Afia Nkrumah, is a theatre director who moved into making films a few years ago. She recently got a break when her short film, Shadow Man, was selected for funding by Film London. Here she tells us about her experiences... Cafe Aphra: Hi Afia, I know you've been involved in film for quite a long time, but what made you want to write screenplays in the first place, rather than novels or short stories? (Or anything else!) Afia: I come from an oral story telling background and I worked as a theatre director, so scripts are a more natural way of telling stories for me than the novel or perhaps more 'literary' forms of writing. I also love working with actors and screenplays facilitate that. Cafe Aphra: Where did the idea for Shadow Man come from? Afia: Last year after seeing the "go home" vans driving around parts of London asking migrants to leave the UK or be deported, I was so incensed that I sat down to write my resp...

Josie offered him a lift to the station so he could drink if he wanted to. Just before he got out, she yanked his tie sideways, downward, then more or less straightened it.   “Perfect,” she said.   “Go get her, tiger!” Did it go well? They’d recognised each other, from their online photos, remembered each other’s names correctly.   Stephanie, Steph, either was fine with her.   She hadn’t been late. They’d both found the right clock to meet under.   From there, it wasn’t far to a bar, running, where he’d helped her off with her jacket and bought drinks. “I’m absolutely soaked!” she said with an embarrassed laugh, shaking her head so her red hair flew out in a fan of water droplets.   He wiped his face with the end of his tie. “Sorry, sorry!” He waved off her apologies and noticed that her blouse was wet, perhaps too obviously: she slid her jacket off the back of her chair and back onto herself, muttering about it being colde...

Two men tumble in from nowhere and crash onto the pavement, the distance of a thrown match from my al fresco table. Waiter arrives, setting down hot chocolate ordered thirty minutes ago, hardly acknowledging  brawl, as though it might be a cabaret performance. But my heart races like I’ve been ambushed in a paint-ball combat game. In Europe I’d heard Buenos Aires was a city with stories unfolding on every street corner. Surely not this; not on so balmy a Sunday evening in upmarket Recoleta?  Bigger of the two men is wearing a well cut suit, jacket half come off in the fracas. Other man - no more than a boy now I see him clearly - is gripped in a headlock. His dirtied and oversized T-shirt emphasizes spindle arms, skin chargrilled by the sun. He twitches silently, in the manner of freshly caught prey, but otherwise puts up no further resistance. For brief seconds his gaze meets mine. His eyes have a woebegone stare; all hope given up, they say. Neither...

abounded light confused but radiating stirred and lost between a summer gesture when I was young I always wanted weather apples strewn in grass     I heard the trees ask after me spectral horses strung along the language of the hours back there behind the house in moss I held a story let you sound me out or you spoke in shallow sleep: movement on the wall bed become so small consider what you planted with those stolen seeds: earth reveals its layers  a god to force me under make me loam and garden by Nancy Bevilaqua