…Hollywood in format – one reason to fall in love with Alfons Adetuyi’s romantic comedy

Love Jacked, a 2018 romcom by Alfons Adetuyi, the award-winning Canadian producer and director, is hot on Netflix. It was added on 1st February 2020.

Take love, survival scams, and intense scheming; throw in the shenanigans of ‘meddlesome relatives’ (familial terrains in African matrimonies) and you set the tone for a seriously comical domestic rollercoaster. It’s a good film. I dare you to watch and not crackle!

Love Jacked poster

A determined young woman travels to Africa for inspiration and to recharge her artistic inclinations. While there, she falls in love with a charming South African, and as soon as she seemed to have arrived at a sort of romantic El Dorado, the idyllic love story comes crashing down when she catches the man of her dream cheating.

Traveling back home in frustration, her fate is worsened by her headstrong father who won’t back off her case until she settles down to run the family business. A whirlpool of intrusive incidents would lead to an utter desperation as she switches into a ‘rent-a-hubbie’ mode.

The Love Jacked family

Series of hilarious interchanges soon start to weave themselves around the matrimonial theme in this rom-com that fuses into its thematic concern of love, bouts of seriousness, and languid humour in equal measures. The film was shot primarily in Hamilton, Ontario, with some location shooting in Cape Town, South Africa.

Director/Producer Alfons Adetuyi is one of the five children (4 sons and a daughter) of Joseph Adetuyi (Feb 1921 – Apr 2006) affectionately known as “African Joe”. The senior Adetuyi hailed from Ondo State (Nigeria) and was reportedly the first West African to settle in Ontario (Canada) having left Nigeria aged 17. Alfons’ other brothers; Tom, Amos, and Robert are all into film making/production and are partners in the company, Inner City Films.

Joseph Adetuyi was said to be very proud of his West African roots.

Director of Love Jacked, Alfons Adetuyi

“He was very proud to be an African and he instilled that pride into all of his children,” Alfons affirmed in a 2018 interview with a Canadian entertainment portal. “He brought me to his Nigerian village where he was born and raised, back in 1975 when I was still in high school.”

Since its release, Love Jacked has garnered a couple of awards including the Programmers Award for Narrative Feature at the 26^th Pan African Film Festival (PAFF) in 2018 and a Certificate of Recognition from Los Angeles.

Watch the Love Jacked trailer here:

ARTful Notes is a compendium of commentaries and reports on the performing arts, literary events, and general entertainment. Anchored by Segun Martins Fajemisin. Images courtesy of Love Jacked

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