When Eyimofe premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020, it became the first Nigerian film officially selected at the Berlinale. Over the next year, it travelled to festivals across multiple countries, won prizes in São Paulo and Turin, and was eventually acquired by Janus Films for North American release and added to the Criterion Collection. Back in Nigeria, it opened in select cinemas in April 2021 to a quiet local run, the kind of box office performance that says a lot.
This is only one part of the widely spoken story at the heart of Nollywood’s relationship with global film festivals, where the prestige travels but the business at home rarely follows. Another important part is how the festival ecosystem of these global destinations have not been fully wielded by Nigerian filmmakers as consistent sources of training, funding and distribution. The limited commercial returns at home may partly explain why festivals and the wider infrastructure around them have not always been seen as central to how Nigerian filmmakers build their businesses.
It is a relationship we can go back exactly a decade to examine. In September 2016, the Toronto International Film Festival designated Lagos as the focus city of the 8th edition of its annual City to City programme, bringing eight Nigerian films to one of the Big Five festivals. The lineup included The Wedding Party, 93 Days, The Arbitration, Taxi Driver (Oko Ashewo), 76, Green White Green, Just Not Married and Okafor’s Law. The films’ directors, described as “a pretty impressive, unprecedented group”, including Izu Ojukwu, Omoni Oboli, Abba Makama, Genevieve Nnaji, Kemi Adetiba, Daniel Oriahi, Niyi Akinmolayan, Uduak-Obong Patrick and Kunle Afolayan, sat for In Conversation sessions. OC Ukeje and Somkele Iyamah-Idhalama were named TIFF Rising Stars. TIFF’s artistic director Cameron Bailey declared that “the new cinema of Lagos is bold, exciting, and ready to take its place on the international stage.” The Nigerian contingent descended on Toronto in numbers. The buzz then was real.
A decade later, a question worth asking is: what actually came out of it?
It is worth being precise here that the programme was a curatorial showcase built to introduce a city’s cinema to festival audiences, not a development programme designed to build out an industry’s infrastructure. Nonetheless, at the time it was seen as a game changer for Nollywood’s presence in the global ecosystem as a cash-strapped industry. While a number of the participating filmmakers did not remain in the global festival ecosystem, that had as much to do with the cost of travel, the time festival development cycles demand and a commercial model built for faster returns as it did with any active choice to look away.
That absence can also be read another way. Nataleah Hunter-Young, who supported TIFF programming from 2017 and served as its International Programmer for Africa and Arab West Asia from 2021 to 2024, argues that Nigerian filmmakers may simply have less incentive than others to rely on international festival labs in the first place. “Nigerian filmmakers do not need IFF [international film festival] labs to attain local or international success,” she says, pointing to the strength and regional dominance of an industry that has long built its own routes to audiences and commercial returns. In that sense, what can look from the outside like disengagement may also be a calculation about where value already exists.
That does not erase what may have been left on the table after 2016, but it complicates the idea that continued participation in the international circuit was the obvious next step for everyone. There were, of course, filmmakers for whom that route did fit. Genevieve Nnaji would return to TIFF a couple of years later with her feature debut Lionheart, which was a milestone Nigerian acquisition for Netflix, while Abba Makama continued working within a festival ecosystem that already suited his filmmaking model.
Makama once said that the TIFF premiere for Green White Green is what made him an international filmmaker. From Toronto, the film travelled to Stockholm, Russia, Berlin, Spain and more than seventeen festivals altogether before Netflix licensed it. He became a Berlinale Talents alum in 2018. His second feature, The Lost Okoroshi, premiered at TIFF in 2019; his third, Juju Stories, premiered at Locarno in 2021. Whatever happened for the industry at large that year, Makama knew what TIFF 2016 meant for the kind of career he wanted and built on it deliberately.
Daniel Oriahi was in Toronto that same year with Taxi Driver (Oko Ashewo), already the third highest-grossing Nollywood film in Nigerian cinemas the year before. He has continued on and off within the festival ecosystem since, while also spending time as a mentor at EbonyLife Creative Academy. His 2024 film The Weekend world premiered at Tribeca, the only Nollywood title selected there that year and a first, and he returns to TIFF this year with EbonyLife’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. His films (working with multiple producers who have positioned their films for festivals) have journeyed on a mixed basis, balancing commercial sensibilities with the more artistic and prestige side of the business, a version of the “one for them and one for me” model.
That gap between commercial filmmaking and the wider festival value chain is what filmmaker Taiwo Egunjobi (The Fire and The Moth), whose work has enjoyed critical acclaim while retaining broad audience appeal, has spent much of his career thinking about. Across recent conversations, a common frustration keeps surfacing in the industry: the place and relevance of film festivals across the value chain. He argues that while festivals do not guarantee box office success, Nollywood has never fully grasped their purpose.
Akinola Davies Jr. has himself placed Eyimofe, All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White and Mami Wata within the lineage that made his own film possible. “Recently again, there was Eyimofe, All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White, Mami Wata, all those films are in my family tree,” he said. “We’re all cousins. We’re all related. My film exists because of those films.”
But these remain only a few people, and for the longest time they were mocked as “festival filmmakers.” None of this ranks a Cannes selection above a billion-naira theatrical hit; the point is that an industry capable of producing both consistently is stronger than one that can only produce one. Some individuals have made use of the global film ecosystem this way, while the larger industry still needs to tap into it more. That, in part, is Egunjobi’s point: private financing and the pressure for faster commercial returns have often left little room for filmmakers to pursue the longer festival and development route alongside mainstream work. Much of the capacity required for that route—labs, co-productions and sales-agent relationships—is also producer-led, pointing to a broader shortage of producers built for that particular kind of long-term career.
Hunter-Young points to the timelines involved as one reason the route can be difficult to reconcile with the Nigerian model. Moving through the individual pre-production, development and post-production stages of the international lab ecosystem can amount to “at least a three-year journey”, she says. That pace sits awkwardly beside an industry accustomed to much faster turnaround and pressure on privately financed films to begin returning money. For producers interested in the slower route, the challenge is therefore also finding investors willing to wait with a project.
Mami Wata offers a useful example of what that can demand in practice. Producer Oge Obasi has described a years-long process of labs, workshops and pitching forums. Yet access did not immediately translate into financing. “The project always stood out, but nobody wanted to give money,” she previously told WKMUp, recalling European financiers who struggled to place a Nigerian project that did not resemble the films they expected from the country.
The process nevertheless built capacity alongside the film. Obasi moved through Ouaga Film Lab, Less Is More and Durban FilmMart, where the project won a Sørfond award, before later reaching Venice’s production programmes and securing further post-production support. She has said those experiences taught her how to pitch, navigate international film business and better understand the advantages and limitations of the system. Mami Wata eventually reached Sundance, travelled widely on the festival circuit and secured distribution across multiple territories. The value accumulated across development, financing, skills, relationships and distribution.
What Mami Wata also makes clear is how far this development-heavy model sits from the production culture Nollywood was originally built around. In the early 1990s, Nollywood grew from a video economy: films made quickly and cheaply for VHS and later VCD, sold directly through markets and shops. Speed, volume and direct access to Nigerian audiences were foundational. That legacy still shapes how films are made, financed and judged today, while the global festival ecosystem operates on a considerably slower clock.
“Nollywood did incredibly well as a startup industry,” Egunjobi tells WKMUp. “It solved a problem. It served its people. But to make the next moves, other things become necessary.” These are not just questions of infrastructure or financing. They involve strategic global positioning and building value that outlasts a single release. Egunjobi sees festivals as part of that missing framework.
Many Nigerian filmmakers express understandable scepticism. Festivals are hard to enter, travel costs are high, and selection processes can be opaque and political. There is also the question of what the ecosystem itself selects for.
Hunter-Young is cautious about treating these development spaces as neutral. She questions how much room Euro-American festival labs leave for “African indigenous narrative sovereignty and aesthetic integrity.” While labs can provide invaluable creative feedback, she argues, they can also struggle with work that does not immediately fit the aesthetic or narrative expectations of the mentors and industry experts assessing it. Filmmakers can find themselves seeking validation from the same system whose assumptions they may need to resist.
And festival exposure rarely translates automatically into Nigerian (or wider African) theatrical distribution. If the immediate goal is to recoup costs locally, the route can therefore feel both culturally uncertain and commercially indirect. Perhaps some of the filmmakers who experienced TIFF in 2016 came away more aware of those limitations; perhaps the intervention simply arrived before the industry had the structures to capitalise on it.
“If your main aim is to release in Nigeria and quickly recoup your investment, festivals may not be the best route,” Egunjobi acknowledges. Cinema chains look at numbers, not aesthetics. They make decisions based on stars, familiarity and proven audience habits. Festival films are often experimental, without recognisable faces or familiar genre beats that exhibitors prefer. In a market with limited screens, volatile consumer spending and little structural room for risk, innovation is a luxury many exhibitors cannot afford.
Clearly, festivals and box office serve different purposes. “The systems aim to achieve different things,” he explains. “They do not connect on the same decision-making level.” The error, he argues, is expecting festivals to play a role they were never designed for while overlooking what they actually provide.
When used deliberately, festivals provide a form of infrastructure. They offer access to funding sources, distributors, co-production partners, critics and markets unavailable locally. They create opportunities to build the kind of critical visibility that, over time, broadens audiences and attracts financing. “Pride is valuable,” Egunjobi says. “It expands audiences.”
A newer wave of Nigerian filmmakers is already showing what that machinery can look like in practice. Dika Ofoma, self-taught and once rejected from film school, began with shorts uploaded directly to YouTube before CJ “Fiery” Obasi encouraged him towards festivals. His short A Japa Tale premiered at S16, the festival founded by Makama, Obasi and Michael Omonua. His debut feature, Kachifo (Till the Morning Comes), went through Locarno’s Open Doors programme in August 2025 and won three prizes, including the Sørfond Award, which brought a confirmed Norwegian co-production partner onto the project. By early 2026, it had been selected for La Fabrique Cinéma at Cannes and continues in development with a Norwegian co-producer.
Ema Edosio Deelen took a different route to the same stage. Her film When Nigeria Happens opened Locarno’s Open Doors section in 2025, sold out, and did so without an international co-production partner, something she has said is rarely achieved there. “That moment gave me confidence,” she said. “It told me my work could sit side by side with international films and still connect with audiences.”
The wave extends beyond those two examples. Damilola Orimogunje’s Dear Ajayi, privately funded, similarly moved through international labs and project-development spaces over a couple of years before reaching its 2026 world premiere at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori. Together, these projects show filmmakers engaging the festival ecosystem not only as somewhere to premiere finished work, but as part of how films are developed, partly financed and positioned.
Eyimofe (fully financed in Nigeria) represents another kind of return. Its Criterion Collection honour is not a commercial outcome in the way Nollywood typically measures success, but it places a Nigerian film within the canon of world cinema, the kind of critical standing that, built over time, can expand the conversation around what Nigerian cinema is capable of.
That foundation is arguably paying off in Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the first Nigerian film officially selected at Cannes, where it earned a Caméra d’Or Special Mention in 2025 before later winning the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut. Davies has been open about Nigerian financiers passing on the project before it was eventually carried by UK and Irish financing. Its BAFTA recognition and more than $1.1 million worldwide suggest that the old dismissal of the “festival filmmaker” came too early.
“Parasite was not the start of South Korea’s global cinema conversation,” Egunjobi says. “That journey began years earlier.” Nollywood’s growing box-office scale is not wrong; films crossing the billion-naira mark are a genuine achievement. But commercial muscle and critical architecture do not have to be built at each other’s expense.
That makes TIFF 2016 useful less as a singular missed opportunity than as a marker of what was possible. Since then, Nigeria has received further dedicated international spotlights—Beyond Nollywood at IFFR in 2018, Focus Nigeria at Carthage in 2019 and Country in Focus: Nigerian New Wave at Winterthur in 2023—while a newer generation (most especially, the diaspora) has increasingly entered labs, funds and co-production programmes themselves.
Without multipronged funding structures, grants or risk-mitigating exhibition models at home, cinema chains will continue to programme what feels safe and audience development stalls. This is precisely why the international ecosystem can matter beyond the pursuit of laurels.
But the responsibility does not sit with Nigerian filmmakers alone. Hunter-Young argues that international festivals and labs also have to make a convincing case for their relevance to an industry that has long found ways to function without them. “It will be up to international festivals and labs to prove their relevance, capacity, and investments when it comes to incubating the next wave of Nigerian cinema,” she says. “Otherwise, Nigerians will continue to handle it themselves.”
“They are only worth it if you know what you are doing,” Egunjobi says, when asked whether young filmmakers should still pursue the festival route. “Festivals require clarity. Are you in it for the short term or the long haul? Are you building international audiences, partnerships, or sustainability, or are you looking for quick returns? Without a strategy, festivals disappoint. With one, they create real value.”
With a growing number of new wave Nigerian filmmakers, both at home and in the diaspora, engaging regularly with festivals and their affiliated programmes, how much value Nigerian cinema will ultimately extract from that ecosystem in the coming years remains an open question.
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