One look across festivals so far this year, for me as a Nigerian, has been the presence of Nigerian documentaries in their lineups. Festivals serve as a good place for them to start their run, as they seek wider distribution, acclaim and even more festival momentum.
With the return of a documentary to Nigerian cinemas earlier this year after a stellar run for Mothers of Chibok and Beyond Olympic Glory, it is worth tracking and taking a look at new Nigerian documentaries still on their festival run which non-fiction fans can look forward to whenever they are eventually distributed to the general audience.
MKO
1993 promised the dawn of a new era for Nigeria, the world’s most populous Black nation. After years of brutal military rule, the country stood on the verge of democracy, with the titular figure at the centre of it all: Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, who died during the process. This investigative documentary by Ose Oyamendan (a then young journalist who worked for Africa’s biggest-selling weekly paper published by MKO before fleeing to the US) attempts to answer the lingering mystery of who killed MKO Abiola and why, interviewing key figures who were present around this moment in history, such as Ibrahim Babaginda, Thomas Pickering, Abdulsalami Abubakar, Theodore Zadok (MKO’s prison guard), Walter Carrington, Wole Soyinka and Adotei Akwei. The documentary was part of the International Competition at Sheffield DocFest 2026.
Hope is a Word
Hope is a Word is a feature documentary executive produced by Femi Odugbemi in a co-production between Norway, Italy and Nigeria. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, where oil extraction has poisoned the land for decades, poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey nurtures a new generation of writers testing how their voices can reshape a decades-old struggle. Directed by Norwegian-Italian filmmaker Maria Galliani Dyrvik, Hope is a Word had its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest 2026, where it competed in the International First Feature Competition. Nigeria’s Allen Onyige is also credited as one of the film’s two cinematographers.
Mothers of Chibok
Following its world premiere at DOC NYC in 2024, Joel Kachi Benson’s Mothers of Chibok has gone through festivals such as Encounters, where it took home Best African Feature Documentary, Fipadoc, NollywoodWeek and the Human Rights Film Festival in Berlin, where it received the 2026 Willy Brandt Documentary Film Award. A follow-up to his 2019 VR short Daughters of Chibok, Mothers of Chibok chronicles a group of mothers grappling with the aftermath of the kidnapping of their daughters by Boko Haram as they continue to live in limbo amidst economic hardship and ongoing security concerns. It had a short theatrical run in Nigeria earlier this year.
Crocodile
Kaduna-raised family members known as The Critics Collective took a story about their creative and personal lives directly to Berlinale earlier this year for a world premiere in the Forum section. Co-directed by the young boys and New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly, it was in production for over a decade as it follows their lives from their teenage years into near adulthood and how they transform their surroundings into a DIY filmmaking collective, using limited resources to imagine and create their own cinematic worlds. After its world premiere in Berlin, the documentary also screened in Tribeca’s Viewpoints section and was up for the Youth Jury Award at Sheffield DocFest.
My Jebba Story
Kagho Idhebor brings his keen cinematography eye for lenses and frames to this personal documentary that can also be described as a photo album of sorts. My Jebba Story had its world premiere at S16 Film Festival 2025, where Idhebor took home the Audience Choice Award. Using snapshots captured by Idhebor himself, video footage and mixed-media animation, My Jebba Story captures what might be tagged as a notorious neighbourhood to tell a story about how the community evolves physically and socially after his move to Lagos. At the same time, we follow his own personal growth as an individual passionate about photography within the community he once called home. The monochromatic project will screen at this year’s Encounters Film Festival.
Mi Tazi
Mi Tazi is a short documentary about a group of people we rarely see in Nigerian pop media. The documentary by Blessing Bulus went through StoryMi Academy, a workshop that produced the last AMVCA documentary winner, where she developed the project about a young artist who returns to her ancestral home in Nok, Jaba Local Government Area of Kaduna State, haunted by the fear of forgetting her late father. In the process, she uncovers how clay sculpting was once used as a means of preserving memory. The documentary was selected for the Durban International Film Festival 2026.
Muscle
Karimah Ashadu’s Muscle is an experimental documentary that screened in the Forum Expanded section of Berlinale 2026. With its non-linear narrative, the documentary examines the world of men’s bodybuilding within a Lagos weightlifting community. It is a tale shot almost entirely in close-ups of the Black male body, describing the many attributes the men attach to this hobby, lifestyle and identity. Karimah Ashadu is a British-born Nigerian filmmaker working across various visual art forms whose works explore “labour, patriarchy and notions of independence pertaining to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and its diaspora”. The short documentary was commissioned and produced by Camden Art Centre (UK), Fondazione In Between Art Film (Italy), and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (USA), with Golddust by Ashadu serving as co-producer.
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