EXCLUSIVE: A most unusual rights deal has closed, as Boies Schiller Entertainment bested several producer/financiers vying to tell the story of Abdullahi Tumburkai. Who?
He is a farmer in Nigeria, who, in a desperate race to save the lives of his two brothers, successfully negotiated and ransomed their freedom from kidnappers.
Kidnapping has become a cottage industry in regions of Nigeria amid poverty and the inability to make a living in the farming region of Kaduna. After getting his brothers back — Tumburkai sold his farm and paid around $13,000 to free them after 33 days — he became the neighborhood go-to guy for others desperate to recover kidnapped love ones. Tumburkai did all this for free, defying the government that had taken a firm stance against negotiating with kidnappers. The governor of Tumburkai’s home state of Kaduna even vowed to prosecute all negotiators for aiding the cause of terrorists and filling their coffers.
Then, Tumburkai was forced to use the skills he learned in freeing around 80 captives, when his pregnant wife Fatima was among 37 college students kidnapped. By the time Fatima was freed 55 stressful days later, she’d lost the baby in a miscarriage. Tumburkai spent stressful nights cajoling the kidnappers to trim their ransom demands and trying to stop government forces from staging a raid on the kidnappers/gunmen. On his phone exchanges, Tumburkai expressed sympathy for the circumstances that compelled the kidnappers, who were left on the outside looking in after violent feuds between herders from the Fulani minority and farmers over access to land for cattle left them bereft. The violence and a weak police presence allowed the displaced herders to steal thousands of guns, creating a well armed group of kidnappers.
How did Tumburkai find himself besieged by Hollywood producers and financiers eager to make a deal to tell his story?
“I credit the Wall Street Journal for bringing this story to the attention of America and an international audience,” Tumburkai told Deadline. “And then there are so many offers from Los Angeles, people contacting me every day.”
He seemed surprised by all this, perhaps because he negotiates so often, he can think of little else.
“My two brothers, I got the money from selling my own farm and my only cow,” he said. Freeing his wife was more complicated because the local governor told him to stop. “I told him we are not going to stop because they are not doing anything. They said they tried to use military action, but said they had lost one soldier. I told them, “Please do not use force.’”
After a long standoff, Tumburkai found a cleric who made contact with one of the bandits. Tumburkai said they gave him money to live in the bush with the captors and help broker a pipeline that eventually led to all of the students being freed for around $78,000. “They asked for money and for the release of three of their men who’d been arrested,” he said. “I said, ‘We don’t have that much money, and we are not the government and we can’t release anybody.’”
Late last year, he was encouraged to tell his story to WSJ reporters Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw and Gbenga Akingbule. The moment his ordeal was published January 7 in a compelling story that captured the farmer’s high-wire act – imagine brokering hostage negotiations with gunshots ringing out on the other side of the phone connection as kidnappers threatened to murder captives — the film-rights chase began. Tumburkai said he received numerous solicitations via social media, and calls. But Boies Schiller was the first to locate him, and he liked what he heard.
“It is very important for me that the world will hear what is happening in Nigeria, that the world hear of the negligence of our government,” he said.
Schiller read the WSJ article and immediately got his partners to begin the chase.
“We agreed this would make for a great inspirational story,” he said. “We reached out on Facebook, able to have a conversation quite quickly on social media. His story and the circumstances you find him in are absolutely compelling and his ability to overcome them is inspirational. Once he was able to save his brothers, friends and neighbors in his community were knocking on his door, saying, can you help me get my wife back, or daughter. He’s been doing this for free, nonstop since getting his brothers back, against in many instances against the instructions of the local government. He’s a completely compelling character.”
So far the WSJ article is not part of the rights package.
Schiller said now that the deal is signed – Tumburkai limits his negotiating to human hostages and relied on a local lawyer in Nigeria to negotiate this deal – development will start quickly. “We signed the deal Friday and we’re about to do all that now,” he said. “Hire a writer and fully finance this film and bring it to the world as quickly as possible.”
They managed to make the rights deal without ever meeting in person, but rather relying completely on social media portals, said Boies Schiller Entertainment SVP Devin Andre.
“This has been an exercise in understanding the brilliant connective-ness of the world,” he said. “We spend a lot of time trying to find underlying IP. How can someone in Los Angeles connect with a farmer in Nigeria? I was not only able to find him on Facebook, I was able to confirm his identity and from there, connect with him. I asked would he be willing to tell his story as a film, and that was what he wanted. Soon we were on a Wattsapp conference call. It shows how far the world has come in the technological space and for different communities to connect. We were first to talk to him, and he said he wanted to complete the deal so he could stop getting the calls from L.A. He has been inundated.”
Said David Boies: “The power of a great story comes from identifying or developing characters and events so transcending that they bridge barriers of culture and borders to connect to audiences’ hearts everywhere. Surrounded by threats, we can be forgiven for forgetting the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things when those that they love are threatened. Abdullahi Tumburkai’s true account of negotiating his own wife’s freedom from kidnappers in Nigeria is exactly the kind of story today’s world wants and needs.”
Schiller said that one of the reasons Tumburkai and Boies Schiller were eager to see a movie made was the possibility it will help what they believe to be a very correctable crisis.
“Kidnapping was not a problem in his region five years ago,” Schiller said. “Some people had their cows stolen, and they had no way to make a living. So they kidnapped one person and made a little money and that became a way to make money. He believes there is a way to solve this and we would like to create a platform for him, to bring the attention of the world to this. It’s not the Ukraine crisis; this is something that can get resolved by tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions of dollars. There is an opportunity here to tell a compelling story, but also to do some good.”
Boies Schiller’s next film is The Desperate Hour, the Naomi Watts-starrer it co-financed and sold post-Toronto to Vertical Entertainment and Roadside Attractions for a February 25 release.