Written by Elijah Oluwanisola.
In 2022, Derin Adeyokunnu and B.B. Sasore’s Nemsia Studios announced a three-picture slate deal with Prime Video. The first, B.B. Sasore’s Breath of Life (2023), became an audience favourite, securing five major awards at the 2024 AMVCAs. Taiwo Egunjobi’s A Green Fever (2023) continued the studio’s interest in ambitious genre-driven storytelling, while Korede Azeez’s With Difficulty Comes Ease (2024) strengthened that ambition with a quieter, critically acclaimed film — achieving acclaim for its thematic depth, delicate portrayal of grief, and subtle critique of the mishaps of patriarchy to womanhood in Nigerian society. Together, these films positioned the studio as a force capable of challenging Nollywood conventions. By 2025, Nemsia had released about ten films directly to Prime Video, most recently Finding Nina and Thicker than Water, both centering on missing women and the act of searching.
Absence is a condition of being: man is perpetually without something he desires at every point in life, so he seeks to remedy his absence. A search is the medium through which man’s desire, obsession, and emotional need are articulated — essentially for the gratification of the seeker. These films do not deviate from the human instinct of remedying absence through a search.
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In Famous Odion Iraoya’s Finding Nina, JB (Abdulazeem Ibrahim), a photographer from Northern Nigeria now working in Lagos, embarks on a journey to reshape the single narrative of poverty and violence of Northern Nigeria. During an outing, he accidentally captures a stunning woman — an adult Nina (Ijapari Ben-Hirki) — who he immediately recognises from his childhood. JB goes on a desperate search to reconnect with her, prompting him to abandon his broader social mission. In Yomi Adejumo’s Thicker than Water, journalist Ese (Adaobi Dibor) journeys to Ile Agbadami to uncover the truth behind her estranged sister Onome’s (Bimbo Ademoye) disappearance. In both cases, the act of searching is more about the seeker’s internal quest and less about the woman who is missing.
The gender of the seeker shifts the emotional tone. JB’s pursuit of Nina is filtered through a male gaze: he obsesses over her, and his fixation overshadows his initial mission to reshape the single narrative of Northern Nigeria. His journey moves from social purpose to personal obsession. Ese’s search, by contrast, is defined by agency and responsibility; she navigates familial duty and grief. While both seekers struggle with absence, the male perspective in Finding Nina is entangled with projection and desire, whereas the female perspective in Thicker than Water is of personal loss and moral accountability.
Geography, in both films, shapes meaning yet betrays it. Finding Nina begins with a noble intention — to confront the single story of Northern Nigeria. But the first images we see on JB’s arrival contradict that mission: two almajiri boys fighting, an overloaded cab spilling passengers into the driver’s space and the booth. Later, when he reconnects with Nina, they both reminisce about a riot that claimed the lives of their loved ones — JB’s mother, Nina’s parents, and the husband and children of her aunt, who later became her guardian. The film ultimately reaffirms the very stereotype it set out to disprove — a North reduced to chaos and grief.
Thicker than Water, on the other hand, situates its mystery in Ile Agbadami, a town supposedly haunted by disappearances and ritual acts. Yet the town seems untouched by fear or grief; we never feel the effects of its hauntedness. Ile Agbadami, as a backdrop, is ordinary decoration, rather than atmosphere. In the Nollywood context, geography is a lazy emotional code. Locations are rarely treated as layered, living spaces; instead, they serve as shortcuts for emotion — the city for ambition, the North for misfortune, the village for nostalgia, simplicity, or ritual. Geography is often used to keep stories within the boundaries of what audiences already expect. Both films continue this tradition of reductive geography.
Visually, Da’anong Gyang’s cinematography in both films asserts itself as an expressive, almost dominant presence. Finding Nina leans into ethereal realism, memory montages, and visual metaphor, drawing us into JB’s inner life. Thicker than Water employs gloomy, genre-faithful imagery that mirrors the psychological tension of Ese’s quest. Yet in both cases, the strength of the cinematography exposes the narrative weaknesses. As Roger Deakins notes, cinematography should serve story; here, images are compelling but carry narratives that collapse under safe storytelling.
The representation of women distinguishes these films from more exploitative Nemsia productions like Jerry Ossai’s Ms. Kanyin. In Finding Nina, Tomi Ojo’s character is a thriving art curator who owns an art gallery, while Fortune Fadahson’s portrayal of JB’s mother presents a brave woman unafraid to walk away from a relationship where trust and respect are fading. In Thicker than Water, Adaobi Dibor’s character actively cares for her sick mother, while navigating her own path, eventually becoming a journalist. Both films, while not without flaws, offer a responsible representation of women, especially when contrasted with Ms. Kanyin’s gratuitous and exploitative treatment of sexual harassment against women.
Yet what these films gesture toward, perhaps unconsciously, is the broader erasure of women in society. In our society, the disappearance of women is not borderline. Women disappear not only from society, but from the fullness of themselves. This disappearance takes many forms, and sometimes, it begins with violence. According to the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (as cited by the United Nations Development Programme), 31% of women aged 15–49 have experienced physical violence since age 15. In Lagos alone, the Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency reported 8,692 cases of domestic and sexual abuse between August 2024 and July 2025 (Punch Newspapers, 2025). Violence is the most vocal erasure — the undoing of a woman’s existence in plain sight.
But women disappear in quieter ways too, through the slow erosion of self and the pain of silently navigating self-healing in a society void of justice. For the sake of home-building, many women abandon their careers and dreams. Women are instinctively required to give themselves up to become wives and mothers. In our society, disappearance is a moral condition — a quiet epidemic of women learning to shrink themselves to fit into patriarchal standards. In public discourse, the search for missing women frequently shifts from confronting absence to displaying virtue. It is a spectacle of morality, a disguise of empathy. Filmmakers tell gender-equitable stories to secure grants, activists wear feminism as costume, and men perform allyship in public while demeaning women in private.
The search, stripped of sincerity, becomes another industry of performance — one that feeds on absence instead of confronting it. The missing woman is seen, but ignored. Finding her is mostly a disguise for the seeker’s self-service. In truth, she is mostly never found. The search is futile, for she is never looked for in sincerity. The “missing woman” is not merely she who is sought in Finding Nina or Thicker than Water; she is every woman who has been told that her highest virtue lies in vanishing, in silence, in being unseen under the gaze of patriarchy. The act of searching in these films, ultimately, mirrors a larger cultural imagination that romanticises absence: it is not solely about the missing, but about the void in those who seek. How, then, do we find the missing woman? How do we unlearn the desire for her disappearance?
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