The Supreme Price premieres at the Lights, Camera, Africa!!! Film Festival

Abiola   At 7 p.m. on September 27, 2014, a documentary, The Supreme Price, dedicated to businessman, publisher and politician, the Late Chief M.K.O. Abiola, will be premiered at Federal Palace Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos.

Synopsis: “In 1993, Nigerian elected M.K.O. Abiola as president in a historic vote that promised to end years of military dictatorship. Shortly after the election, however, Abiola was imprisoned as another military regime assumed power, and his wife, Kudirat, took over the leadership of the pro-democracy movement, organizing strikes and marches and winning international attention for the Nigerian struggle. Because of this work, she too became a target and was assassinated in 1996.  “Director Joanna Lipper elegantly dovetails past and present as she tells this story through the eyes of Hafsat Abiola, who was about to graduate from Harvard when her mother was murdered (her father died in prison two years later). Determined not to let her parents' ideals die with them, Hafsat has dedicated her adult life to continuing their fight for democracy. Returning to Nigeria after years abroad, she is at the forefront of a progressive movement to empower women and dismantle the patriarchal structure of Nigerian society.  The Supreme Price is an unprecedented and personal look at the Abiola story-which is still unfolding.” Director Joanna Lipper's latest documentary, The Supreme Price, received the Gucci Tribeca Spotlighting Women Documentary Award and launched Gucci's Chime for Change Women's Empowerment Campaign at TED2013.  Lipper is an award-winning filmmaker. Her work as a documentary filmmaker has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, ITVS, Britdoc Foundation, the Tribeca Gucci Documentary Fund and Chicken & Egg Pictures.  Lipper is a lecturer at Harvard University where she teaches Using Film for Social Change in the Department of African and African American Studies. Lipper is the author of the nationally acclaimed book "Growing Up Fast," which documented the lives of teen parents in Pittsfield, MA. The national impact of this book and a related documentary was the subject of a segment of The Jane Pauley Show (NBC). Her photography has been published and exhibited in the US and overseas.