Between the peak streaming years and today, Nigerian documentaries skipped cinemas entirely. Streamers like Netflix were testing out ideas. Festivals provided prestige. And urgency-driven independent docs could be found on YouTube. That context makes Joel Kachi Benson’s Mothers of Chibok worth paying attention to. Set to be distributed nationwide by FilmOne from February 27, the film is one of the widest cinema rollouts for a Nigerian documentary. It is also a rare moment when the industry can examine the performance of nonfiction on the big screen. FilmOne’s involvement, Joel Kachi Benson explains, began with a direct outreach. “It was honestly a shot in the dark,” says Benson. “They believed in what the film represents for Nigerian cinema.”
In the years when Nigerian documentaries overwhelmingly bypassed cinemas altogether, high-profile titles like Afrobeats: The Backstory, Awon Boyz, Marked, Skin, and Journey of an African Colony found international audiences through Netflix, while Prime Video platformed projects such as Where the Heck Is My Period?, Rainmakers, Super Eagles ’96, and Take Light. Disney+’s Madu, which went on to win Benson an Emmy in 2025, marked an international high point. Elsewhere, Showmax-backed titles like Shine and Freemen circulated within the viable subscription ecosystems, while institution-led releases such as Nigeria: The Debut lived on owned platforms like FIFA’s website. In practice, many of these streamer acquisitions skewed toward music and sport, and were often released with little to no local promotion.
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Collectively, these films showed Nigerian documentaries travelling and slowly accruing prestige. Also, it meant audience impact was measured in views and awards. It is worth mentioning that foreign streaming investment has since slowed down in the region. Against that backdrop, the early decision to give Mothers of Chibok a wide theatrical rollout shifts the non-fiction conversation into the terrain of public, box-office-facing reception.
Running parallel to the streamer era was another, quieter and urgent documentary ecosystem. On YouTube and at curated screenings, films like Before We Had a Name (Ntetee’s exploration of the history of sickle cell disease) and Awaiting Trial (which explores police brutality and the unresolved trauma of the EndSARS movement) prioritised immediacy. Then, Model Citizen (cast a spotlight on the toxic modelling industry), Innovating Africa Documentary: The Rise of Tech in Nigeria (focused on the flying tech sector), Death to Thirty (took a more personal approach into womanhood and feminism), and most recently Dika Ofoma’s An Enugu Homecoming (a celebration of Enugu’s creative and innovative space).
Elsewhere, projects such as Goethe’s Post-Memory, Post-Archive reimagined Nigeria’s film history through special screenings staged across the country. The power of these works lies in community circulation and critical engagement with audiences through conversations.
Together, the various paths sustained documentary practice during the last half-decade, reinforcing the idea to many that documentaries belonged either online or in temporary, event-based spaces. Today, the theatrical ambitions of Mothers of Chibok can be seen as an attempt to bridge these divided worlds—bringing the political urgency and cultural weight long nurtured outside cinemas back into the exhibition economy. For Joel Kachi Benson, whose 2019 11-minute short Daughters of Chibok was conceived as a VR work and therefore circulated through festivals and immersive platforms (such as Meta Quest/Oculus and PHI VR TO GO), the sequel film (centered on the enduring lives of mothers of the Chibok girls abducted by Boko Haram over a decade ago) marks a return to the same subject under different exhibition conditions.
That ambition was planned. As Joel Kachi Benson puts it:
“Pretty early on, I knew this film should be experienced communally. It’s a story that carries emotional weight, but it also carries dignity, and that lands differently when people are watching together. This was a three-year labour of love, made with an extraordinary team, and we wanted Nigerians to have the full cinematic experience of watching a documentary made by us, for us. It’s not the most common route here, but it’s absolutely worth it.”
That is especially pressing for a growing slate of recent Nigerian documentaries that remain without clear distribution futures. Lace Relations, which screened at AFRIFF 2025, and Abba Makama’s The Kids Are OK, which premiered at S16 in 2024. Others, including Beyond Olympic Glory and O.Y.O (On Your Own), continued to travel across multiple festivals in 2025, accumulating prestige and visibility but little certainty about how they might ultimately meet broader audiences. Meanwhile, the international pipeline and presence remain active: The Critics’ Crocodile and Karimah Ashadu’s Muscle are set to screen at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2026.
“Yet I genuinely believe the audience for factual storytelling is growing,” says Benson, speaking to the challenge of distribution in a difficult global non-fiction market. “If we want that audience to expand, we have to do more than upload films; we have to normalise documentaries as cinema-going experiences. Theatrical is part of building that culture and showing that the genre belongs in the mainstream conversation.”
Collectively, these films prove the global, structural gap that Mothers of Chibok (after festival rounds at DocNYC, Encounters and FIPADOC) now faces and why its theatrical route feels like a potential blueprint that more documentaries could follow. “It’s early days and there will be teething problems, but if distributors and filmmakers commit to it, we can build a model that works, and, most importantly, grow the audience that wants these stories,” says Benson. By pairing a nationally resonant subject with the region’s leading distributor and a full theatrical rollout (in Ghana and Nigeria), Benson’s film tests whether documentary storytelling can be both widely seen and collectively experienced in Nigeria.
Mothers of Chibok is produced by JB Multimedia Studios, Hunting Lane and Impact Partners in association with Shark Island Productions. In cinemas in Nigeria and Ghana from February 27.
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