Lena Trüper arrived from Germany to begin her doctorate at UCLA in 2020, her scholarly focus on art and technology movements of the 1960s.
At the time, she had never heard about a two-decades-long humanitarian crisis in Jos, Nigeria. And making a documentary film was decidedly not on her to-do list.
Five years later, Trüper is not only nearing the completion of her Ph.D., but she also can now call herself a film producer. “Wake the Flies,” a 26-minute documentary she helmed, explores violence, displacement and trauma in Jos, a city of roughly 900,000 in central Nigeria. Home to more than 50 ethnic groups, Jos has been wracked by violent conflicts — spurred by an array of issues — that have killed thousands of people since 2001.
The film was completed in April; since then, it has been screened in Nigeria and Germany, and by Trüper’s UCLA home department, European Languages and Transcultural Studies. Trüper and her colleagues are now submitting it to film festivals and are planning to discuss the project at a conference in Germany this fall.
Trüper’s path to producing the film began at a 2023 conference in Frankfurt, Germany, where she presented a performance piece about which scholars are given a voice in academia. As part of the presentation, Trüper pantomimed a fly trapped in flypaper, catching the attention of University of Jos lecturer Longgul Makpring Dakwom. Their shared interest in the symbolism of the fly — as both a harbinger of death and a borderless observer — sparked a collaboration.
“The fly was our connection point from the beginning, our idea how to connect to the audience across different continents,” Trüper said.
