Director: Chris Eneaji
Producer: Yvonne Jegede Fawole
Script: Berth Rogers
Cast: Yvonne Jegede- Fawole, Bolanle Ninalowo, Chelsea Eze, Bimbo Akintola
Year: 2017
Chisom (Yvonne Jegede Fawole) plays our lead suffering character, who has to endure rape from her foster father. She is eventually kicked out from the house by his wife after getting pregnant. The street becomes her home and in a bid to survive, she finds a job at a local restaurant. Unfortunately for her, missing money and the discovery of her pregnancy makes her lose help for the second time. She starts hawking on the street and meets two girls that come to her offering help, but they end up taking advantage of her problems.
When we meet Chisom as an adult, she is telling her story to Diane (Bimbo Akintola) who has been given the task of writing her Biography. We soon find out that Chisom has some days to live and is passionate about telling her story.
Purple but not Purple is an incredibly painful story of one woman’s journey through life. Because this is an emotional story, it shadows a lot of errors made by the filmmakers but it is a story worth your time. This is the reality of many girls on the street. Once they get abused, they are thrown out. Some mothers choose to believe that their husbands are incapable of hurting these young girls, and so they will further hurt the girl, and stay married, than risk their marriage for any child.
Yvonne Jegede does an incredible job as Chisom and this comes close to her performance in the Third Chance. This is an incredibly emotional film and it takes a lot of emotional control to sit through “Purple but Not Purple”. I love its insistence on realism, and even though this feature is incredibly long, it fortunately, mirrors some of the problems that women in our society have to endure.
“Purple but Not Purple” earns a 7/10
