Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Juma.
Hi Sarah, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Settling in Los Angeles, which is eight thousand miles away from Abuja, Nigeria, where I was born and raised for half of my life, has been a maze! I’ve always known I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a screenwriter, but I went to college first for a Bachelor’s in international political economy, winding up at BofA Merrill Lynch in NYC before pivoting to my true passion.
When you’re a young African kid, it’s tough to justify the arts, specifically film & TV in my case, as a viable career path; the cliché is that career choices are “doctor, lawyer, engineer, and banker. The fifth option is disappointment.” My parents, fortunately, recognized my talent (and champion me to this day), but they were very cautious and drilled a mantra of staying realistic plus financially stable into me. So, to keep everyone happy, I did banking by day and writing by night. However, shortly before the pandemic, I chose to get my MFA in screenwriting and that has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. For one, I’ve come out of the three years a much more refined and methodical writer, thanks to some impeccable industry veteran professors and talented peers. And because I’m also a go-getter, I relentlessly pursued opportunities outside the classroom and got to work at Village Roadshow, Hello Sunshine, and now Warner Bros. Discovery.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
My MFA program culminating right at the start of the Writers Guild strike was definitely tough, but it was 100% necessary. I’ve had exposure to the investor side of the media industry and don’t believe that creativity should be so constrained by the aggressive desire to deliver net profit to shareholders at all costs. Some of these shareholders are hedge funds who couldn’t even name one show that the writers, cast, and crew are tirelessly working to deliver on the streaming platforms whose stocks are in their portfolio; I would hear such on earnings calls. Where does the balance come from, where investors channel that money into Hollywood and trust filmmakers in the driver’s seat because it is their medium, after all, to deliver on the strength of their good stories?
Beyond that, I’m in an industry where creatives hear a lot of nos. Art is inherently subjective, so when you create it from an emotional place, self-doubt can creep in if you feel like people didn’t receive it as you’d hoped they would. The key is learning not to take it personally and decoding the note beneath their notes for next time.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m primarily a screenwriter who has also directed and produced my own short films. Very recently, my film Trinket, which made a long voyage from a micro-fiction story to finalist script in the Shore Scripts Short Film Fund contest and then to festival screens, was nominated for Best Human Rights Film at the Cannes World Film Festival and won Best African film. It chronicles a day in the life of a housekeeper who’s thrown in jail after a politician says he’s lost a Rolex in his room at the hotel where she works. I love exploring class dynamics and inequity in my work, and I think it’s a story that infuriates and sticks with viewers because of how much it mirrors the unfair society around us, especially in Nigeria, where I’m originally from.
Right now, though, my main focus is television and occasionally features. I love writing pilots that center on a strong-willed, morally conflicted outcast character in a high-stakes world, and maybe that’s because they are mirrors. For instance, my pilot Minority Interest, which recently made it to the semi-finals of the Disney DET Writing Program, is loosely inspired by my time on Wall Street as a young Black banker who wasn’t necessarily a cultural fit for that very fast-paced, ultra-cutthroat, hyper-masculine space; what you see on HBO’s Industry is pretty much the life.
What were you like growing up?
I like to say that I was born a storyteller because, in my early teens, I would always get in trouble for spacing out in class and writing fiction in my notebooks instead of following what was on the board, usually math. After serving detention (which peers would laugh at me for), I would do it all over again. What that told me, even if I hadn’t realized it then, was this was my calling, the craft I’d risk everything for. But the irony in this is that right out of college, I had that stint of dealing in the stock market professionally while I continued to write screenplays in my free time. So much for not paying attention in math class, yeah?
When my attention was at its peak, though, was when I was glued to a movie I’d tied up in my parents’ living room VHS player in my pre-teen years – the usual suspects being Coming to America, Home Alone, and Double Platinum with Diana Ross and Brandy. For some reason, I gravitated to the art form – memorizing lines, knowing the actors’ and directors’ names by heart, acting out scenes with my little sister (she’ll say I bossed her around, haha). I’m grateful that as I grew older, I didn’t lose that innocence of being fascinated by film. Oddly enough, and fortunately, at the same school where I’d been placed on detention for writing stories, a regimented Jesuit boarding house, we had movie nights every Friday, and for a period, there was a cinephile priest principal who would show us his curated selections ranging from Road to Perdition to Fiddler on the Roof. While watching these, I would always say under my breath that I would be part of that world, filmmaking that is; I just didn’t know when or how I’d get there. But here we are.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writebrainedsarah/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/AceOfStories
Image Credits
Cyprian Eduvie
