Rahman Oladigbolu
Storyteller/Filmmaker 

Welcome to my official website, where I tell you all about myself and my work.  

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Every life is a story.

 

 

Rahman Oladigbolu is a Boston-based filmmaker who moved to the United States about two decades ago armed only with the dream to make films. He started out in Boston as a production assistant on films and television shows and 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 at the Center for Digital Imaging and Animation school, CDIA, an affiliate of Boston University, where he would be mentored by film professor Howard Phillips. 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 harrowing and 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 film 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. 

 

Soul Sisters went ahead to win the “Best Emerging Filmmaker" award at the Roxbury International Film Festival and "The Artist of the Year" 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.  

 

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.

 

Rahman is currently in the development stage for his next film, tentatively titled A Private Experience, an adaptation of the story “A Private Experience” written by the New York Times bestselling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the story centers on 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.