Half
of a Yellow Sun is thus an extremely difficult book to make into
a film, it has so many layers, characters, sub, side and corner
corner plots that there is no way all of these can be fit into a feature
film.
I guess it is finally time to share my review the film, a task have
been putting off. I should obviously declare my interests prior to
starting, I am Nigerian, Igbo, in one of my lives an amateur military
historian of post 1945 conflicts of which the Nigerian Civil War is one,
a great fan of the book Half of a Yellow Sun, its author Chimanda Ngozi
Adichie who I consider to be a voice, if not the leading Nigerian voice
of my generation, director Biyi Bandele who I discovered through his
book Burma Boy (which is also crying out to be a film) and lead
actor Chiwetel Ejiofor about whom I really don’t need to say much- if
you don’t know ask somebody.
The story for those unfamiliar with the book is about two sisters
from a wealthy Nigerian family who at Nigeria’s independence set out on
very different romantic paths, the cool, distant, sophisticated