My Father’s House explores the booming African community in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou through the turbulent story of an underground church founded by Nigerian missionary Daniel Michael Enyeribe, called by a “vision” to go to China and begin a new life there.

Completed in 2011, My Father’s House had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2011.

SUMMARY:
The film begins with the first of several police raids on Daniel’s growing church in Guangzhou. Uniformed police interrupt an ordination ceremony for the Nigerian church’s China-based divinity school and read relevant laws and regulations on religious activity in China.

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Following police raids 2004 and 2005, the story unfolds in two strands, as Pastor Enyeribe is denied abode in China and is forced to take refuge in nearby Hong Kong. The Guangzhou church continues to grow in his absence but under his constant direction, thanks to new technologies like Skype, which he uses to deliver Sunday sermons to Guangzhou and other underground churches.

The film follows Pastor Enyeribe’s story as well as that of another local pastor, Ignatius, the acting head of the Guangzhou church, his Chinese wife Xiao Yi, and their young child.

The life of the church offers a rich perspective on the booming African community in Guangzhou, as traders struggle with cultural, personal and financial challenges, rally to the side of “brothers” detained by Chinese authorities, and seek Christian converts among the local Chinese population.

In the weeks ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games, the Guangzhou police raid the church once again and padlock its doors. Ignatius is forced to leave the country. By the time he returns in 2009, Xiao Yi has given birth to their second child in his absence.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:
Throughout the process of making this film, I expected events to unfold with a natural drama and excitement reflecting the ups and downs of this emerging community in China. Looking back, the environment in which I filmed and the whole process and texture of the character’s lives yielded no events of particular excitement to engage my viewers in and of themselves. Instead, I followed my subjects endlessly through the mundane — and perhaps to some, uninteresting — details of their lives. Almost imperceptibly, the baby daughter of the Nigerian pastor, Ignatius, and his Chinese wife, Xiao Yi, grows into a lively and adorable child heading off to school. In the midst of turmoils unseen — gaining complete access to this secretive and protective community was often a major challenge — they give birth to a second child, a son. In the end, this film is a documentation of life and home, in all of its delightful ordinariness, as it is emerging under the most extraordinary of circumstances.