Author: T.I Isioma

There is a small café on the left-hand side of the fairly ordinary Palms Shopping Mall in Lekki. The jazz music is unremarkable and never quite at the right volume to be appreciated or ignored. The small coffee-sipping, croissant-munching patronage is doing its best to ignore the blandness of the music. The colours are olive green and wood. Michael Omonua’s Second Feature Film, ‘Galatians’, Based on His Short Film ‘Rehearsal’, Has Been Selected at La Fabrique Cinema 2023 If you walk through this establishment on any given weekend, you are liable to find Michael Gouken Omonua perched amiably on the…

In the past few years, foreign interest in and funding of Nigerian cinema and movie making has ticked up in ways that previously felt unrealistic to even plan for. Much of it can be attributed to the absurd wealth of narratives that can be gleaned from Nigeria’s endless lore by foreign enthusiasts. The other aspect of it is the economics. Buoyed by its large and still growing content-hungry population, Nigeria’s market has become too lucrative to ignore now and especially for the future. When you factor in the impressive work Nollywood has done in ensuring that Nigerians love homemade content…

The Hughes Brothers created what is at its core the archetypal black youth story of the 70s through to the 90s (where most of the film’s action is situated) and unfortunately, even now. The violence is taught early. The violent are young. The parenting is outsourced to the streets. The opportunities are small. And the police are state-sanctioned goons out to bully or actively remove the black minority.  Question of Memory: Inside Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and Nigeria’s EndSARS Protests Watts, California is where all this happens. This piece of urban jungle hell is the culmination…