Indie Film of the Day: Toluwa Fayemi’s ‘Code/Switch’

Toluwa Fayemi is an African-American writer, director, actor, scientist and science educator based in Toronto, Canada. Born in the Bronx and raised in California, he began writing Sci-Fi scripts with his friends, acting them out in their backyard. 

After earning his BSc. in Physics from the University of Western Ontario, Toluwa landed a contract a researcher and writer for CREAM Production’s “A Curious Mind” starring Dominic Monaghan (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, LOST). Following that, Toluwa founded the Hogtown Heroes, an artist collective of actors, cinematographers, and producers in the eponymous city of Toronto. 

The team’s first project was Code\Switch (2019) a five-part webseries written and directed by Toluwa and produced by he and his team. The series follows Toyin, a young, queer black woman working in the tech industry and incredibly talented software engineer, as she works for one of Toronto’s many dating app startups. 

Running away from her past as a dangerous hacktivist and as a (literal) backend developer, Toyin finds herself hidden in the background in more ways than one. She finds herself struggling to find her voice – and save her company – as she slowly slips further and further back into the life of a black-hat hacker. 

Code\Switch was originally just one storyline in a large anthology series called Hogtown, which was shelved in mid-2018. With the release of Code\Switch and the overwhelmingly positive reception,  Code\Switch was licensed to the AfrolandTV streaming service in the United States, and Toluwa has since begun working with major Canadian networks to develop a larger project: 

Hogtown, The Series. Hogtown has attracted the interests of some of Canada’s premier networks and as of November 2019, the Hogtown Heroes have officially begun producing the series for expected release in the summer of 2020. Hogtown is a series that follows the intertwining lives of young adults in Toronto with millennial-crises that manifest in strange, surreal, and sometimes supernatural ways. 

Hogtown sets itself aside from contemporary young-adults dramas with its healthy doses of sci-fi and surrealism, making for a special blend of an inner-city “Twin Peaks” with a northern “Atlanta”. Make sure to check out Hogtown Heroes on Instagram and Facebook!