For a film built on conversation and emotional intimacy, Mirrors never quite finds the depth of feeling needed to make those questions truly resonate.

By Joseph Jonathan

Marriage stories often begin where romance ends. 

Long after the wedding photographs have faded into family albums and social media memories, what remains are the quieter negotiations of everyday life: money, grief, expectation, resentment, compromise. It is in this difficult terrain that Mirrors, directed by Yemi “Filmboy” Morafa and written by and starring Diana Childs, situates itself. Released on Prime Video, the film strips away the distractions of spectacle and secondary plots to focus almost entirely on two people confronting the wreckage of a marriage that neither seems fully prepared to let go of.

In an industry where relationship dramas often rely on sprawling ensembles, melodramatic twists, or comedic diversions, Mirrors makes a more unusual choice. It is essentially a two-hander (a film centred primarily on two characters and their relationship), built around a single extended conversation between Eddy (Diana Childs) and Yemi (Kunle Remi), a couple standing at the edge of divorce. Eddy is in the process of moving out. Divorce papers have been served. Yet before the separation becomes final, the pair sit down for one last conversation, revisiting the story of their relationship and attempting to understand how a marriage built on love eventually collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.

The premise recalls films such as Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) and  Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013). Throughout the conversation, Eddy and Yemi recount shared memories that unfold in flashbacks, with each character offering their own interpretation of events. The technique highlights a simple but often overlooked truth about relationships: no marriage contains a single story. There is only perspective. Every disagreement produces competing narratives, every hurt carries its own justification, and every memory becomes a site of negotiation.

What emerges from these recollections is not a portrait of two people who never loved each other, but rather two people whose love proved insufficient against deeper incompatibilities. Eddy comes from a modest background; Yemi is the sole heir to considerable wealth. Their differing attitudes toward money become one of the fault lines running through the marriage. Yemi frequently approaches problems through provision and ownership. His instinct is to point toward what he has purchased, provided, or secured. Eddy, meanwhile, seeks emotional partnership rather than financial reassurance. To her, Yemi’s language of provision gradually begins to feel like a language of possession.

The film becomes particularly compelling when examining how grief exposes these differences. Following a miscarriage, the couple find themselves mourning in fundamentally different ways. Eddy retreats inward, yearning for comfort and emotional intimacy. Yemi, conditioned to respond to problems with provision rather than presence, gives her everything except what she needs. 

They grieve the same loss in completely different languages, and the distance between those languages is where the marriage quietly dies. The tragedy itself is devastating, but Mirrors is ultimately more interested in the emotional distance that tragedy creates. The question is not whether the couple suffered; it is whether they knew how to suffer together.

There is something refreshingly mature about the film’s willingness to interrogate the limits of love. Nigerian cinema often treats marriage as an institution whose preservation is inherently virtuous. Separation is frequently framed as failure, while endurance becomes its own moral achievement. Mirrors push against that assumption. 

The film repeatedly suggests that love alone cannot sustain a relationship. Communication, emotional intelligence, shared values, and mutual understanding matter just as much. Sometimes, the film argues, the healthiest thing two people can do is recognise that their differences have become irreconcilable.

It is an idea that feels particularly resonant within a Nigerian context, where cultural and religious expectations continue to place immense pressure on couples to remain together regardless of circumstance. Yemi embodies much of this worldview. His commitment to the sanctity of marriage is sincere, even admirable. Yet the film quietly asks whether preserving a marriage should always take precedence over preserving the people inside it.

Morafa deserves credit for embracing such a minimalist framework. In many ways, Mirrors represents the kind of formal experimentation Nollywood often needs more of. It resists the temptation to dilute its central premise with unnecessary subplots and instead commits itself to character, conversation, and emotional excavation. The decision is risky because it leaves the film with nowhere to hide. Every scene depends on the strength of the writing and the performances. Unfortunately, that is where the film begins to struggle.

For a story built almost entirely around dialogue, the conversations frequently lack the emotional texture needed to sustain them. Rather than feeling like two people excavating years of accumulated hurt, many exchanges feel overly constructed, as though the characters are explaining themselves to the audience rather than speaking to each other. Important emotional revelations arrive, but they rarely land with the force they should because the dialogue often feels too neat, too deliberate, and occasionally too flat.

The performances face a similar challenge. Childs and Remi both demonstrate an understanding of their characters’ emotional journeys, and there are moments where genuine vulnerability breaks through. Yet too often, the acting feels restrained in ways that undermine the film’s emotional ambitions. A project this intimate requires performances capable of transforming ordinary conversations into compelling drama. When those performances remain merely competent, the film’s emotional stakes become harder to fully invest in.

The film’s limitations are further exposed by the foundational logic of its central premise. The decision to frame the entire narrative around a final conversation between two people in the process of divorcing raises a question the film never satisfactorily answers: why are they having it? What is the purpose of this conversation for these characters? In legal and emotional terms, the divorce is already in motion; the papers have been served, Eddy is moving out, and the decision has been made. 

A final conversation of this intimacy and duration, in which old wounds are reopened and old love is briefly visible again, requires a dramatic justification that Mirrors does not provide. It is possible to accept the conversation as a structural device — a container for the film’s thematic content — but the best two-handers, from Before Sunrise (1995) to Marriage Story, earn their conversational architecture by making the conversation itself feel necessary to the characters rather than merely useful to the filmmaker. Here, the conversation occasionally feels like it exists because the screenplay needs it to rather than because Eddy and Yemi need it to. 

This issue is compounded by pacing. At just under eighty minutes, Mirrors is not especially long, yet its slow-burn structure occasionally stretches scenes beyond their natural endpoint. Certain exchanges linger longer than necessary, creating a sense of repetition that tighter editing might have alleviated. The film clearly wants audiences to sit with discomfort and reflection, but there is a fine line between contemplative and stagnant.

Yet even with these shortcomings, there is something admirable about what Mirrors attempts. In an era where much of Nollywood’s streaming output gravitates toward familiar formulas, Morafa and Childs choose a more difficult path. The film is interested in emotional ambiguity rather than easy answers. It trusts conversation over spectacle. It understands that relationships often end not because of a single catastrophic event but because of countless smaller fractures accumulating over time.

That ambition alone makes Mirrors noteworthy. It may not fully succeed in translating its ideas into compelling drama, but it points toward a kind of filmmaking that remains relatively uncommon in mainstream Nollywood. One hopes more filmmakers will take similar risks, while recognising that projects this stripped-down demand extraordinary precision in both writing and performance.

In the end, Mirrors is perhaps most interesting as an experiment. It asks worthwhile questions about love, grief, class, and the expectations we bring into marriage. It challenges romantic notions that love can overcome every obstacle. And it demonstrates a welcome willingness to break from convention. But for a film built on conversation and emotional intimacy, it never quite finds the depth of feeling needed to make those questions truly resonate. What remains is a thoughtful, ambitious work whose ideas are ultimately stronger than its execution.

Rating: 2.6/5

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big

The post “Mirrors” Review: Yemi Morafa’s Two-Hander Is Undone by Its Own Screenplay first appeared on Afrocritik.

If June 12 means anything, it cannot simply be that Nigerians once demanded democracy. It must also mean that democracy remains answerable to those demands.

By Joseph Jonathan

Nations are, among other things, memory management projects. They cannot function on unresolved history. The friction of a painful, contested, genuinely unfinished past is incompatible with the civic cohesion that states require, so they do what institutions have always done with uncomfortable material: they process it, package it, and return it to the public in a form that is easier to live with.

The French celebrate Bastille Day on July 14; a revolution whose actual violence, whose terror, whose guillotines and factional massacres, is largely absent from the ceremonial version. What survives is Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité: the aspiration, stripped of the bloodshed that accompanied it. The United States of America marks Independence Day on July 4, 1776, a date whose declaration that all men are created equal coexisted without apparent contradiction with the institution of chattel slavery. The founding myth is preserved by carefully managing what it is allowed to mean. South Africa built the Rainbow Nation (one of the twentieth century’s most powerful post-conflict narratives) on a truth and reconciliation process that, for all its genuine moral courage, ultimately produced acknowledgement without restitution. The trauma was processed. The structural inheritance of apartheid was not.

The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a principle: states prefer commemorative certainty to historical ambiguity. A holiday is not a reckoning. It is a replacement for reckoning. It takes the volatile, unresolved energy of a historical wound and converts it into something annual, predictable, and safe; a ceremony that marks the wound’s existence without requiring that it be healed.

This is what Nigeria did with June 12 in 2018, when President Muhammadu Buhari announced the date change of Democracy Day from May 29 and conferred a posthumous GCFR on Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola. Many Nigerians received the announcement as an act of long-delayed justice. For the families of the dead, for the activists who had been detained and beaten across years of struggle, for ordinary citizens who had stood in queues only to have their choice erased, the official recognition carried genuine emotional weight. To dismiss that weight entirely would be dishonest.

Like all successful national narratives, this one contains a great deal of truth. It also leaves something out. The election of June 12, 1993, was not a democratic triumph. It was a democratic catastrophe. Votes were cast but never allowed to reach their conclusion. The winner was never sworn in. The mandate was never restored. The struggle that followed consumed lives, produced years of repression, and ended with Abiola himself dying in detention. If June 12 represents anything, it represents the violent interruption of democracy by the state.

Which raises an awkward question. Why does Nigeria commemorate a democratic failure as Democracy Day?

This is not an argument against remembering June 12. Quite the opposite. The date deserves remembrance. The activists who were detained, exiled, beaten, and killed deserve remembrance. The ordinary Nigerians whose votes were nullified deserve remembrance. The question is what kind of remembrance is taking place.

Because memory and commemoration are not the same thing. Memory preserves discomfort. It keeps old arguments alive. It refuses easy closure. Commemoration, by contrast, often organises the past into usable stories. It selects heroes, identifies villains, and transforms complicated histories into civic lessons. States do this constantly. Every national holiday is, in some sense, an argument about history disguised as ritual.

For twenty-five years, one of the most consequential events in modern Nigerian history (duly represented in popular culture) had existed in an uneasy space between public memory and official silence. State acknowledgement mattered. But acknowledgement is not the same thing as reckoning. And that distinction is what makes June 12 worth revisiting today.

The Election That Never Became Government

To fully understand the weight and significance of June 12, let’s take a trip back in time. On June 12, 1993, Nigerians participated in what is still widely regarded as the freest and fairest election in the country’s history. The contest pitted MKO Abiola of the Social Democratic Party against Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention. It unfolded under the supervision of General Ibrahim Babangida’s military government, which had spent years managing an elaborate and repeatedly delayed transition programme.

Abiola won, but more importantly, he won in a way that seemed to challenge many assumptions about Nigerian politics. He performed strongly across regional and ethnic lines, securing support in parts of the country that conventional wisdom suggested should have been inaccessible to him. For a brief moment, the election appeared to offer something rare in Nigerian political life: evidence that a genuinely national democratic mandate was possible.

That possibility lasted eleven days. On June 23, Babangida annulled the election. The decision was justified through legal technicalities and bureaucratic language, but its political meaning was unmistakable. Millions of Nigerians had participated in an election organised by the state, only to discover that the state reserved the right to reject the outcome.

What followed was not the neat morality tale that commemorative speeches often imply. Babangida eventually stepped aside, handing power to an Interim National Government headed by Ernest Shonekan. The arrangement collapsed within months. General Sani Abacha seized power in November 1993 and established a dictatorship that would become synonymous with repression, censorship, political assassinations, and the systematic destruction of dissent.

Abiola declared himself president in 1994 and was arrested. He remained in detention for four years. His wife, Kudirat Abiola, emerged as one of the most prominent voices of resistance. In 1996, she was assassinated in Lagos. Her murder became one of the defining symbols of the violence that accompanied the struggle. Abiola himself died in detention in July 1998. He was never sworn in. The election was never restored. The mandate was never recovered.

This matters because contemporary commemorations often compress the history into a story of democratic perseverance. Yet what happened in 1993 was, first and foremost, a democratic failure. The state organised an election, voters participated in good faith, and the outcome was nullified. The most remarkable thing about June 12 is not that democracy succeeded. It is that democracy was denied.

Which is precisely what makes its later transformation into Democracy Day so interesting. Nations do not merely remember the past. They interpret it. They decide which events become symbols, which symbols become rituals, and which rituals become part of national identity. The question, then, is not whether June 12 deserves remembrance. The question is why this particular memory was eventually elevated into a national holiday, and what happened to its meaning in the process.

The Strongest Case for June 12

Before interrogating the cost of the date change, it is worth seriously engaging with what it was trying to honour, because the case for June 12 as Democracy Day is not exactly a weak one.

Its most compelling form goes something like this: democracies are not born in transitions. They are born in struggle. May 29, 1999, was not a democratic achievement; it was a negotiated elite settlement. The constitution Nigerians currently operate under was drafted not by elected representatives but by a military government preparing its own exit. The man who won the 1999 election was a former military head of state whose democratic credentials were, at the point of his election, entirely theoretical. The handover was real. But it was a handover between elites, on terms set by the departing military, ratified by an electorate that had been given no meaningful alternative.

June 12, by contrast, represents something the Nigerian political process has rarely produced: a genuine expression of democratic will that crossed ethnic and regional lines, that was not managed or manufactured by any incumbent power, that emerged from the people rather than being administered to them. If democracy is, at its root, the idea that political legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed, then June 12 is Nigeria’s most democratic moment. May 29 is when the soldiers went home. June 12 is when the people spoke.

More than that, the people who fought to keep June 12 alive (who were arrested, exiled, killed for it) deserve to have their sacrifice located in the national calendar. NADECO’s members who went underground. Kudirat Abiola was shot in her car in broad daylight. Beko Ransome-Kuti, imprisoned. Gani Fawehinmi, harassed across decades. Their struggle was specifically for the mandate of June 12. To commemorate a different date would be to erase the specific content of what they fought for.

The date embodies an idea of citizenship that extends beyond elections and governments. It speaks to the willingness of ordinary people to defend political rights even when doing so carries significant risks. The years that followed the annulment produced some of the most sustained democratic resistance in Nigeria’s modern history. Journalists endured censorship and harassment. Activists were detained and exiled. Civil society organisations continued operating under increasingly hostile conditions. Some paid for their commitments with their lives.

To many Nigerians, it is this broader struggle, not merely the election itself, that June 12 commemorates. The argument is difficult to dismiss. Indeed, one could plausibly contend that May 29 always suffered from a symbolic weakness. It celebrated the arrival of democracy without adequately acknowledging the sacrifices that made that arrival possible. It focused attention on the settlement rather than the struggle. In doing so, it risked presenting democracy as something granted from above rather than demanded from below. June 12 corrected that imbalance. It shifted the emphasis from institutions to citizens, from transitions to movements, from government decisions to popular resistance.

This is a serious argument. It deserves a serious response.

The response is this: everything the argument says about June 12 is true, and none of it is what the 2018 date change was actually about. The date change honoured the struggle in name while performing a very different operation in substance. To see what that operation was, you have to look not at what the ceremony claims to remember, but at what it requires you to forget.

The Ideological Operation

When Buhari moved Democracy Day to June 12, his government accomplished something worth describing precisely. It took a date that represents democracy’s violent interruption — the beginning of an annulment, the opening of a wound — and reframed it as democracy’s foundation. June 12 in the official version is no longer the day Nigerian democracy was destroyed. It is the day Nigerian democracy began. This reframing is not neutral. It is load-bearing.

If June 12 is where Nigerian democracy begins, then 1999 is where it arrives. The May 29 handover, for all its compromises and limitations, became the vindication of the June 12 struggle; the moment the wound finally healed, the mandate finally honoured, the people’s will finally ratified. And the democracy that has existed since 1999 (with its rigged elections, its looted treasuries, its dynasty politics, its legislature of rentiers, its executive impunity) inherits the moral authority of a movement it did not complete and has, in structural terms, consistently betrayed.

The elegance of the operation is worth admiring, even as you resist it. By adopting June 12, the post-1999 Nigerian state claimed the legacy of a pro-democracy struggle while remaining institutionally continuous with the forces that the struggle was fighting against. Many of the politicians who have governed Nigeria since 1999 were participants in or beneficiaries of the military system that produced the annulment. The transition did not remove them. It reabsorbed them, gave them new titles, new electorates, and the same impunity. The date change allowed this class to drape itself in the symbolism of a resistance it had, in many cases, actively opposed.

Buhari himself is almost incidental to this argument, a vessel through which the operation was performed, but not its author. The operation belongs to the state. Any government seeking to manage the memory of June 12 would have faced the same temptation and the same choice: genuine reckoning, which is costly and destabilising, or commemorative theatre, which is cheap and consolidating. The theatre won. It usually does.

Consider what genuine reckoning would have required. It would have meant asking what happened to the specific democratic demands of the pro-democracy movement, not merely civilian rule, but accountable governance, press freedom, the protection of citizens from state violence. It would have meant accounting for the fact that many figures from the Abacha era transitioned seamlessly into the civilian order. It would have meant sitting with EndSARS (which happened in 2020, two years after the date change, twenty-one years into Nigerian democracy) and acknowledging that a government which massacres protesters at a toll plaza is not the inheritor of a democratic struggle. It is its repudiation.

A holiday cannot hold all of this. It is not designed to. The holiday is designed to make these questions unnecessary, to replace the restlessness of unresolved history with the comfort of annual remembrance. The danger of June 12 as Democracy Day is not that it makes Nigerians remember. It is that it convinces them that remembering alone is enough.

The Myth Needs a Hero

There is another cost to the commemorative version of June 12 that runs deeper than politics, and it has to do with what national myths require. Myths require heroes. Not men, heroes. The distinction matters because men are complicated: contradictory, morally mixed, shaped by the same structures they sometimes oppose. Heroes are simpler. Heroes are what myths need.

MKO Abiola, in life, was a man. He was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Nigeria, a fortune built substantially on proximity to military power. He had been a close ally of Babangida’s government before becoming Babangida’s most prominent victim, a relationship that is not incidental to understanding the political economy of the 1993 crisis. None of this cancels the wrong done to him or to the twelve million Nigerians whose votes were erased. But the commemorative version of June 12 cannot accommodate this complexity. It requires Abiola the hero, and so Abiola the man, with all his contradictions intact, has been quietly retired.

The more serious cost of this simplification is what it does to everyone else. The pro-democracy movement that formed around June 12 was larger, more radical, and more politically coherent than Abiola himself. NADECO contained voices whose democratic commitments were not personal to Abiola, who were fighting for a principle, not a patron. Fawehinmi had been a democratic agitator long before 1993 and would remain one long after. And Kudirat Abiola, whose assassination in 1996 is among the most brazen acts of political murder in Nigerian history, was not simply a loyal wife. She was an independent political actor who chose to continue a struggle she could have abandoned, under conditions of genuine physical danger.

These figures have received their posthumous honours. But in the commemorative architecture of June 12, they remain supporting cast. The myth has one protagonist, and everyone else orbits him. What is lost in that arrangement is the most important thing the pro-democracy struggle actually demonstrated: that democratic commitment does not require a candidate. That the principle is larger than any individual who embodies it.

A commemoration that genuinely honoured the June 12 struggle would put the movement at its centre, not the man. It would ask what the movement demanded (beyond Abiola’s inauguration) and hold the present accountable to those demands. Instead, the holiday gives Nigeria a martyr. Martyrs are easier. They do not make demands of the living.

May 29 and the Accountability It Kept

Something was lost when May 29 was retired as Democracy Day, and it is worth naming it.

May 29 was an imperfect date. The 1999 transition was rushed and military-designed, the constitution undemocratically produced, the leading candidate a former general. These criticisms are valid. But May 29 marked something specific and traceable: the moment from which the current democratic order is directly descended. It was the institutional origin of the republic Nigerians actually live in, with all its specific failures and all its identifiable architects.

Keeping May 29 would have maintained a form of accountability that June 12 dissolves. The problems of Nigerian democracy (the INEC manipulation, the godfatherism, the legislative capture, the executive impunity) are not betrayals of some pure democratic ideal. They are the direct, traceable consequences of specific choices made in 1999 and after, by specific people who are mostly still alive and, in some cases, still in office. May 29 kept those people in the frame. June 12 lets them exit it, replacing their accountable faces with the untouchable image of a martyred candidate.

By relocating democracy’s origin to a wound rather than a transition, the date change made the failures of Nigerian democracy feel like the continuation of an old theft rather than the result of new ones. The annulment is now always already the explanation. The soldiers are always to blame. The civilians who have governed for twenty-five years recede into the background as inheritors of a damaged system rather than agents of its continued deterioration.

The Question the Holiday Forecloses

June 12 deserves to be remembered. The people who suffered for it deserve to be honoured. The election of 1993 deserves its place in the national consciousness as evidence of what Nigerian democracy can be at its best: multiethnic, voluntary, legitimate in a way that subsequent elections have rarely matched. None of that requires a public holiday that does the work of settlement rather than reckoning.

That possibility is what makes June 12 worth revisiting, not because the date is unworthy of commemoration, but because commemoration should never exempt a society from asking whether the promises attached to that memory have actually been fulfilled. For if June 12 means anything, it cannot simply be that Nigerians once demanded democracy. It must also mean that democracy remains answerable to those demands.

The most honest thing you can say about June 12 is that the wound it marks has not healed. The democratic deficit the annulment created (the sense that elections in Nigeria are ultimately subject to the veto of power) has not been resolved by twenty-seven years of civilian governance. The political class that manages Nigerian democracy emerged from the same system that produced the annulment and has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it shares that system’s fundamental instinct: that power, once held, is not surrendered to the will of the electorate without a fight.

The holiday does not say this. It cannot. Its function is precisely to say something else, to provide a moment of national consensus around a shared wound, to transform political failure into cultural memory, to make Nigerians feel that they have reckoned with something when they have, in fact, only remembered it.

Nations do this. It is one of their oldest and most reliable operations. The question is whether citizens are obliged to participate in the performance, or whether they are permitted, required, even to ask what the ceremony costs.

What June 12, as Democracy Day, costs Nigeria is the restlessness the date should produce. The annulment of 1993 should make every subsequent election feel provisional, every abuse of democratic process feel like a continuation of the original crime, every moment of state impunity feel like evidence that the wound has not closed. That restlessness is not comfortable. But it is honest. And it is, arguably, the only political disposition adequate to the actual condition of Nigerian democracy.

The holiday offers something easier: pride, mourning, solidarity, the warm shared feeling of a people who have suffered and survived. These are not nothing. But they are not enough. And the day Nigeria decides that the feeling is enough is the day the state wins the argument it has been making since Babangida picked up his pen in June 1993.

The election was stolen. The mandate was never restored. The holiday arrived twenty-five years later, and called the debt paid. It is not. 

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big

The post Should We Actually Celebrate June 12 As Nigeria’s Democracy Day? first appeared on Afrocritik.

If The Serpent’s Gift had one lesson for Nollywood, it would be that cultural truth requires more than surface markers.

By Joseph Jonathan

Films do something blunt and unavoidable: they teach. Every shot, every costume, and cut either bolsters an image the world already carries about a people or complicates it. The Serpent’s Gift, directed by Kayode Kasum, signals an ambition to do the latter — to interrogate widowhood, wealth, and inheritance in a contemporary Igbo setting. Too often, though, it takes the cheaper route.

At its core, The Serpent’s Gift is straightforward: Nduka Sylvanus (Chico Aligwekwe), a wealthy businessman, dies suddenly; his young widow Ijeoma (Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman) finds herself under siege from relatives hungry for control of his empire. 

That premise, inheritance as battlefield, widowhood as vulnerability, has strong dramatic potential. But the film’s recurring error is a dramaturgical one: it treats certain customs as if they were the default script for contemporary Igbo culture, deploying them for maximum emotional jolt rather than interrogating their place in modern social practice.

Let’s be specific. The Serpent’s Gift repeatedly foregrounds widowhood rituals — the forced ceremonial walk, the insistence that Ijeoma drink the water used to bathe her late husband — and stages them as though they are normative in South-East Nigeria today. 

That choice reads like sensationalism disguised as ethnography. If you want the audience to understand why such practices persist (despite the fact that they hardly do nowadays), you show the debates, resistances, compromises, and legal or civic contexts that shape them. Instead, these rituals float in the frame as spectacle: dramatic curiosities to be watched, not social problems to be understood.

That tendency toward spectacle is compounded by sloppy world-building. Remove the language, and nothing about The Serpent’s Gift feels specifically Igbo. This isn’t a throwaway grievance — it’s the film’s central, damning weakness. The screenplay peppers dialogue with proverbs and local phrases, but the mise-en-scène often contradicts the claims of cultural specificity. 

There are moments so incongruous they yank viewers out of the drama: a wealthy businessman’s office decorated with the faces of national politicians who, in context, make no sense; an Ibadan branch of Nduka’s company where all the characters default to Igbo instead of English or a believable hybrid of Yoruba, Igbo and English; and, conversely, there are scenes set in Igbo contexts where the characters oddly switch to English. 

Even the funeral of a titled man is staged like an afterthought rather than the elaborate social event it should be. These are not minor slips. They signal a lack of scrutiny and research that makes the film feel like a pastiche — an image of Igbo-ness assembled from familiar icons rather than a living, internally consistent world.

Why does this matter? Because when a film claims cultural authenticity but fails to get the small things right, it invites two harms. 

First, it exoticises: audiences unfamiliar with Igbo culture will take these dramatised anomalies as normal practice. Second, it erodes trust among the community depicted. A scene that treats a titled man’s burial as underwhelming — when, by social and cultural expectation, such a burial would be elaborate, public and ritualised — doesn’t simply misread detail; it shrinks the stakes. 

If the director wants us to grieve the loss of a man whose wealth will evaporate into the hands of the wrong custodian, the funeral sequence should affirm why that loss matters socially and symbolically. Here it does not.

Small details earn large consequences. The decision to have Ijeoma relay the news of her husband’s death to the family via conference call — with none of them present at the hospital during Nduka’s final moments — strains credibility. In many Igbo communities, illness and death are communal events with kinship obligations that mobilise the extended family. 

Yes, the film suggests that Nduka hid his terminal illness, which could explain why relatives were absent. But even secrecy has limits: sudden hospitalisation or end-of-life care would typically trigger communal intervention, whether through family networks, business associates, or community elders. 

By presenting absolute isolation as an unquestioned fact, the film bypasses the very tension it needed to dramatise — the clash between a man’s desire for privacy and a culture’s insistence on communal presence. That clash could have enriched the story; instead, we are left with a thin shorthand that weakens emotional stakes.

Performances, to the film’s credit, keep it watchable even when the script and world-building falter. Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman is the film’s moral gravity: she finds the narrow seam between resolute anger and brittle grief and carries the film through its less credible stretches. Her Ijeoma is not simply victimhood in motion; she’s a woman negotiating a public claim to legacy with private sorrow. 

Tina Mba’s Margaret gives the film its sharp, antagonistic edge — a matriarch, who at times feels deliberately overdrawn, but whose presence grounds the familial friction. Stan Nze’s Nonso, by contrast, often flirts with broadness; his greed is readable, but it lacks the textured human desperation that would have made him more than an archetype.

The screenplay (credited to Stephen Okonkwo and Ufuoma Metitiri) is a mixed bag. It nails cadences and the rhythm of local speech in places, and some lines resonate with the weight of oral tradition. Yet, the script is reluctant to interrogate the practices it stages. 

Instead of dramatising the legal, economic, and moral mechanisms that sustain certain rituals — the role of title societies, the influence of patriarchal inheritance laws, the social sanctions that enforce conformity — the film lingers on performative acts of humiliation. That’s a storytelling choice with consequences: the viewer learns what happens but never why it still happens, or how it is contested.

Technically, The Serpent’s Gift does offer some pleasure. The cinematography captures the South-East’s green pulse; there are moments of visual lyricism that suggest a respect for place. 

The soundtrack, steeped in Igbo highlife motifs, works as an affective tether to a Nollywood lineage that can be both nostalgic and invigorating. Those formal strengths make the film’s missteps more disappointing: they show the crew had the tools to render a complex cultural portrait, but chose spectacle over nuance.

If The Serpent’s Gift had one lesson for Nollywood, it would be that cultural truth requires more than surface markers. Accuracy is not only about avoiding factual error; it is about showing social texture — the disputes, the negotiations, the everyday resistances that exist inside any living culture. To dramatise widowhood without showing its contested status in modern life is to flatten a subject that deserves interrogation. 

In the end, The Serpent’s Gift oscillates between two impulses: to honour and to capitalise. It wants to ask hard questions about legacy, gender, and wealth in contemporary Igbo society, and yet it keeps stepping onto a stage built of tropes that simplify its subjects for dramatic effect. Instead of deepening our understanding, the film rehearses stereotypes. And that is the most disappointing lesson it leaves behind.

Rating: 1.9/5 

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.

The post “The Serpent’s Gift” Review: Kayode Kasum’s Film Is Undone by Shallow Cultural Detail first appeared on Afrocritik.

Catalog is an invitation to reconsider the division of emotional labour within families, especially in societies where fathers are excused from caregiving simply because they pay the bills.

By Joseph Jonathan

When we speak about parenting on screen, especially in African or Middle Eastern contexts, it is almost always through the mother’s gaze. She is the emotional core, the invisible labourer, the keeper of routines and rituals that hold a family together. 

In Catalog, a quietly stirring eight-episode Egyptian series released on Netflix on July 17, writer Ayman Wattar, and director Waleed El-Halfawy, challenge that longstanding norm, not through sweeping melodrama or activist declarations, but through one man’s fumbling attempt to step into shoes he never thought he’d have to wear.

Mohamed Farrag plays Youssef, a recently widowed father whose wife, Amina (Riham Abdel Ghafour), dies suddenly, leaving him the sole caregiver of their two children, Mansour (Ali El Beialy) and Karima (Retal Abdelaziz). Youssef is not a deadbeat dad in the conventional sense. He loves his family. He provides. 

But like many men in similar roles, he has long been a stranger in his own home: emotionally distant, practically absent, and out of sync with the rhythms of everyday parenting. When Amina dies, Youssef is forced to reckon not only with her absence but with the vast, emotional terrain he never learned to navigate.

It is here that Catalog finds its narrative engine. In a moving twist, Youssef discovers a series of parenting videos Amina had recorded before her death, a kind of posthumous guidebook, filled with instructions and encouragement. These video clips become his lifeline: a blueprint through grief, a mirror to his inadequacies, and a gentle invitation to become the parent he was never socialised to be.

At its heart, Catalog is a slow-burn cultural critique disguised as a family dramedy. It’s an invitation to reconsider the division of emotional labour within families, particularly in societies where the father is excused from caregiving simply because he pays the bills. This critique is subtle, never didactic. 

In one poignant scene, Youssef takes his son to football practice for the first time and is visibly uncomfortable being surrounded by mothers. When he finally spots another man, he assumes the man is a fellow widower, to which the bewildered man retorts, “I come to practice because I’m his father”, cutting through Youssef’s internalised belief that men only show up when forced to.

These moments, quiet, human, but politically loaded, make Catalog more than just a story of grief. It’s a cultural intervention and statement. One that challenges gender roles, critiques male emotional illiteracy, and reimagines fatherhood as a practice of presence, not just provision.

Farrag is masterful in his portrayal of Youssef. Not in the grand emotional crescendos, but in the quiet confusions and failed attempts that mark his growth. His grief is not always pretty; it’s clumsy, frustrated, and deeply human. Abdel Ghafour as Amina, though physically absent for much of the show, haunts every frame. Her presence through the parenting videos gives the show its emotional spine.

The child actors (Ali El Beialy and Retal Abdelaziz) are standout surprises. Their performances are sensitive, intelligent, and heartbreakingly believable. They embody the children of a fractured home: confused, angry, sometimes manipulative, but ultimately yearning for connection.

Khaled Kamal as Hanafi, Youssef’s brother, also shines in a supporting role. A hardened man with a soft streak, Hanafi becomes both comedic relief and moral compass, often delivering wisdom in a way that feels earned, not imposed.

Walid El-Halfawy’s direction is understated but effective. The camera rarely leaves the home, reinforcing the domestic claustrophobia Youssef feels. The sound design adapts with the emotional weather of the scenes, swelling during chaotic moments, and softening during moments of introspection. 

The score, especially the opening music, is beautiful and distinctly regional. There’s something about the instrumentation that signals, immediately, that this is Arab television at its finest — unhurried, emotive, culturally grounded.

The writing is another triumph. The dialogue feels real, often to the point where viewers might find themselves finishing characters’ sentences. It doesn’t pander or overexplain, which is especially important in a show deeply rooted in local nuance. Amina’s monologues are full of small truths, which are not just poetic for the sake of being poetic, but full of the kind of reflections that reveal themselves only through lived experience.

Though rooted in Egyptian life and culture, Catalog speaks across cultures. Its themes of emotional reconnection, posthumous love, and the invisible weight of caregiving, are as relevant in Lagos as they are in Cairo, as resonant in Beirut as they would be in Nairobi. In many parts of Africa and the Middle East, the idea of “fatherhood” still carries the distant, stoic weight of the patriarch. This show gently, but firmly, asks us to let that go.

Even more interestingly, Catalog reframes motherhood not as saintly martyrdom, but as structured intention. Amina’s videos are both acts of care and acts of control, one last way to shape the future of her family in her absence. They are feminist in their very existence: proof that domestic labour is not instinctual but learned, practiced, taught, and therefore, shared.

As a first-time viewer of Egyptian television, I was struck by the narrative precision of Catalog. Unlike many Nollywood series that begin with promise only to meander through unnecessary subplots, Catalog stays true to its emotional arc. Every subplot feeds the main story. Every emotional beat is earned. The pacing is patient but never plodding. This is a masterclass in restraint, a lesson in how to trust your characters enough to carry the story without needing contrived twists or dramatic noise.

Catalog is not flashy. It doesn’t shout its importance. Instead, it invites you into a home, sits you down, and slowly unravels the knot that binds grief, masculinity, and love. It is one of the most culturally grounded and emotionally intelligent shows from Netflix in recent times.

For anyone who’s ever had to relearn how to love—after death, distance, or emotional detachment—Catalog offers a quiet, powerful reminder: it’s never too late to show up.

Rating: 3.5/5 

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.

The post “Catalog” Review: The Egyptian Netflix Series Is Quiet But Speaks Volumes first appeared on Afrocritik.

Slowly but steadily, more African men are beginning to take skincare seriously, not just as an aesthetic pursuit, but as a reflection of wellness, self-respect, and changing ideas about masculinity. 

By Joseph Jonathan

I attended an all-boys secondary school, the kind where masculinity was constantly being performed, tested, and policed. There was always some unwritten contest about who was the toughest, the most rugged, the least bothered about anything remotely “soft”. I remember one harmattan season when a few boys brought lip gloss to school, not for fashion, but simply to keep their lips from cracking under the dry weather. Still, they were ridiculed endlessly. Some were called names. Others tossed the lip gloss away and never brought it back.

Looking back, it’s both funny and sad, how even basic grooming, like moisturising chapped lips, was treated as a betrayal of boyhood. In that environment, the message was clear: to be a “real man”, you had to be tough, indifferent, and unconcerned about your appearance. Self-care, especially of the visible kind, was suspect. To care about your skin—your lips, your face, your body—was to risk being called feminine or worse. 

Before now, the average African man’s approach to skincare was remarkably minimal. Grooming, for many, was a ritual of utility, not care. A bath with black soap or any soap really. A quick rub of petroleum jelly (vaseline) or body cream, if you managed to get your hands on one. The idea of using separate towels for the face and body sounded excessive; a single towel, often sun-dried and scratchy, did the job for everything. Skincare was treated as something indulgent or ornamental, and by cultural expectation, that meant it belonged to women.

This attitude was not just personal but social. In many African households, grooming beyond the basics was policed by gender expectations. A boy who stared at the mirror too long risked being called vain or unserious. Face creams were dismissed as “womanly”. 

Pimples were simply part of life. Few men thought to ask why they had oily skin or dark spots, let alone whether there was anything they could do about it. And even when they did, they were more likely to reach for a harsh antiseptic soap than an actual skincare product. Skincare, where it existed for men at all, was seen as reactive, not intentional.

For the longest time, society insisted that to be a man was to be tough, unbothered, and oddly indifferent to one’s appearance, as if masculinity meant neglect by default. But something is shifting. Slowly but steadily, more African men are beginning to take skincare seriously, not just as an aesthetic pursuit, but as a reflection of wellness, self-respect, and changing ideas about masculinity. 

What was once neglected or laughed off has become a site of self-awareness. A new generation, exposed to global media, health-conscious discourse, and peer influence on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, is challenging the old binary that tied skincare to femininity and neglect to masculinity. In doing so, they are not only reclaiming their skin, they are reshaping the culture.

As with any cultural shift, the natural question is: why now? What’s driving African men to embrace skincare? There are quite a number of factors really. 

Considering the fact that skincare has always been seen as feminine, it is no surprise that for most African men, their entry point into skincare came through the women in their life. It could be through “stealing” the girlfriend’s bodywash from the bathroom cabinets. Or sisters who, tired of gatekeeping beauty secrets, hand over their cleansers and serums with a warning: “Don’t waste it”. What started as casual borrowing has turned into full-blown ownership. 

Take Tobi, a 26-year-old Lagos-based designer, who now swears by his five-step routine but used to wash his face with only water. “It was my girlfriend who put me on”, he laughs. “She got tired of me using her products without asking, so she bought me my own moisturiser and cleanser. At first, I didn’t take it seriously, but then I noticed my face was clearing up, and I actually started feeling more confident”. What started as a girlfriend’s nudge has become a ritual of self-respect. “Now I even remind her to wear sunscreen”, Tobi says, half-joking, half-proud.

While the strength of a woman (shoutout to Shaggy) is quite persuasive, another factor is the growing awareness of skin health. Acne, razor bumps, hyperpigmentation, and others aren’t just cosmetic concerns; they affect confidence, mental health, and self-image. For a long time, men simply endured them in silence. But now, with more information and access to products, they’re treating their skin with intention. Skincare isn’t vanity. It’s strategy. It’s control.

For Ebuka, a historian and researcher based in Enugu, skincare wasn’t something he thought much about until his face reacted badly to a body cream. “I was told it had vitamin C or whatever, and that I shouldn’t use it on my face or step into the sun with it,” he recalls. That caution came from a female friend and it stuck. “To be honest, the average woman knows way more about skincare than most guys,” he admits.

Then there’s the social media effect. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have normalised self-care for men. Influencers—from barbers to lifestyle creators—are openly sharing their routines, breaking down ingredients, and reviewing products. The comment sections are filled with questions from men who are newly curious: “Is this good for oily skin?”, “How do I deal with dark spots?” 

In these spaces, skincare has become communal; a dialogue, not a secret. While some men still scoff at skincare online, those who are curious now find support from a growing community of enthusiasts: a community that barely existed a few years ago.

Economic growth and urban exposure also play a role. As more African men work in corporate settings, entertainment, tech, and media, appearance becomes part of the professional package. Showing up well-groomed—clean-shaven, well-moisturised, intentional—signals self-respect. It screams: I’m paying attention to detail. 

Media influencer, Phil Badung, shares that he only started paying attention to skincare in April of last year. “Honestly, it was peer pressure that triggered the shift”, he says. “I’ve always had good skin, never dealt with acne or breakouts”. But as a content creator, he began to notice how other creators’ skin looked brighter and more refined. “That got me thinking”, he adds. “Then I started getting tanned from sun exposure. Around that time, a skincare store reached out for an influencer deal, that was the sign I needed”.

Like Badung, other African men are also beginning to pay closer attention to their skin, not necessarily because of underlying skin issues, but because they’re becoming more aware of how they present themselves to the world. 

In cities like Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, and Johannesburg, it’s no longer unusual to find men strolling into skincare clinics, booking facials, asking for sunscreen — sometimes shyly, sometimes boldly. Whether it’s driven by career demands, digital visibility, romantic appeal, or simple self-care, the shift is happening: men are slowly shedding the myth that skincare is a feminine pursuit.

Unsurprisingly, the market has caught on. More skincare brands across the continent are now tailoring products and messaging to men. From premium brands like Arami Essentials and R&R Skincare to drugstore-friendly options in open markets and online shops, there’s an expanding range of products made with African skin and climate in mind. Some brands run gender-neutral campaigns with male models front and centre, challenging the idea that skincare is still “women’s territory”. 

According to a forecast by Mordor Intelligence, the men’s grooming and skincare market in Africa is expected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.45% between 2025 and 2030, a reflection of changing perceptions, growing disposable incomes, and increased access to products tailored specifically for men. 

There’s something quietly revolutionary about African men reclaiming skincare as a form of joy. In societies where men are expected to be hardened, silent providers, the simple act of gently massaging moisturiser into your skin can feel like a protest. It is resistance to toxic masculinity, but it’s also restoration. Skincare becomes a moment of solitude, a habit of healing, a ritual of care in a world that rarely encourages men to pause, let alone pamper.

It won’t fix everything. But it’s a start. It represents something larger: a cultural shift toward self-awareness, softness, and emotional health. So if you see a man exfoliating with intent or patting sunscreen onto his forehead, don’t laugh. He might just be loving himself, for the first time in a long time.

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.

The post Why African Men Are Finally Embracing Skincare first appeared on Afrocritik.

Ms. Kanyin reflects the current state of Nollywood’s horror ambitions: bold ideas, impressive technical strides in some areas, but a lack of narrative discipline and thematic coherence.

By Joseph Jonathan 

Nigerian boarding school folklore has long been haunted by the whisper of high heels in dark hallways: Madam Koi Koi, the ghostly figure said to roam dormitories in the dead of night. It’s a tale passed from senior students to the juniors with equal parts fear and fascination, often whispered under torchlight after lights-out.

Ms. Kanyin, a supernatural thriller directed by Jerry Ossai, attempts to reimagine this infamous myth in cinematic form. But in doing so, it falls into a trap familiar to Nollywood’s forays into horror: a strong premise undercut by underdeveloped characters, choppy storytelling, and a baffling lack of internal logic.

Set in the 1990s at Sterling Academy, Ms. Kanyin introduces us to Amara (Temi Otedola), a high-achieving student whose dreams of attending Harvard are threatened when her French teacher, the titular Ms. Kanyin (Michelle Dede), gives her a grade she considers damning. 

Alongside her friends, Amara hatches a plan that involves breaking into Ms. Kanyin’s chalet, and the consequences unleash a sinister force that begins to consume the school and the surrounding community.

That description, while intriguing, reveals just a fraction of what the film throws at you. Ms. Kanyin is packed with subplots—some promising, others perplexing—that never quite cohere into a focused narrative. Instead of enriching the story, they muddy it. 

By the time the credits roll, you’re left asking not just “What happened?” but “Why did it happen that way?” and “To whom exactly?” The internal logic of the film collapses under its own supernatural weight. We’re told an ancient tree awakens after Ms. Kanyin’s blood is spilled upon it but the motivations of the spirit, the timeline of revenge, and even whether Ms. Kanyin is alive or dead, are never clearly established. 

In one scene she levitates and flips a car; in another, she’s almost thwarted by a teenage boy holding a door shut. It’s not fear that grips you, it’s confusion.

That confusion is amplified by uneven storytelling. The film wants to be a horror, but rarely feels horrifying. It relies heavily on gore—slashes, gashes, severed limbs—all delivered through surprisingly decent special effects makeup. 

The cinematography, particularly in the night scenes, helps to establish a mood that occasionally flirts with dread. But that mood never crystallises into real suspense, because the film skips the crucial steps of building tension and grounding character motivations. The jump scares are basic, the atmosphere undercooked, and the supernatural sequences feel more like detached set-pieces than integral parts of a lived-in world.

For a film that is eponymously titled, Ms. Kanyin tells us surprisingly little about its titular character. We’re offered vague allusions to trauma, and failed dreams, but none of it adds up to a fully-formed figure. What does she want? Is she the victim or the villain? Is she even alive? The film doesn’t seem sure, and as a result, neither are we.

The acting is equally uneven. Temi Otedola, who showed some promise in Citation (2020), seems to have regressed here, though that may be more a fault of the writing than her performance. Much of the dialogue feels like exposition delivered at the audience rather than conversations unfolding between people. The characters talk at each other, not to each other, with lines that lack emotional texture or realism. 

The standout performances come from Ademola Adedoyin as Mr. Mustapha—despite his wavering Northern Nigerian accent—and Kalu Ikeagwu as the principal. Toluwani George also brings some heart to the role of Chisom. But they can only do so much with a script that seems more interested in plot devices than in people.

One of the film’s most troubling choices is the inclusion of a sexual assault scene involving Ms. Kanyin and a parent. The moment is presented without emotional weight or narrative consequence. It exists solely as a tool to justify later vengeance, reducing a serious issue to a disposable plot device. It’s a careless move, and one that highlights the film’s broader issue: its unwillingness to engage with its own themes in any meaningful way.

The characters’ motivations often make little sense. Amara, a prefect and overachieving student so morally upright that she must be blackmailed into breaking rules, suddenly becomes impulsive enough to mastermind a cheating scheme that involves breaking into a teacher’s home? 

The narrative leap is jarring and unsupported. Then there’s her friend, Uti (Natse Jemide), whose entire subplot feels like a strange non-sequitur: he’s training for a 100m swim in what looks like a short school pool with no coach and no clear competitor(s). It’s played completely straight, but you’re left wondering whether the film is in on the absurdity or completely unaware.

More frustratingly, there are visible continuity errors that betray a lack of attention to detail, including a diary with the year 2024 in a film supposedly set in the 1990s. Even worse, boom mics make multiple appearances in the frame, a distracting technical flaw that undermines the immersion entirely.

There are flashes of something more: an attempt to explore themes of power, ambition, love (through Ms. Kanyin and Mr. Mustapha’s relationship), friendship (through Amara and her clique), loyalty, and buried trauma. There’s a budding romance, a hint of intergenerational conflict, and the idea that trauma can haunt spaces just as much as spirits can. But these elements are barely developed. 

Instead, the film lingers on spectacle. Even that suffers from inconsistency, with poor editing, awkward cuts, and some amateur CGI effects that feel like a disservice to the solid work done by the makeup and costume departments.

Set in a boarding school, the film does succeed in evoking a kind of nostalgia for those who’ve lived that experience: the strict routines, the friendships, the fear of punishment. There’s something universally eerie about schools after dark, and Ms. Kanyin captures that atmosphere well. But even this strength is undercut by the lack of narrative clarity and a consistent horror tone.

In many ways, Ms. Kanyin reflects the current state of Nollywood’s horror ambitions: bold ideas, impressive technical strides in some areas, but a lack of narrative discipline and thematic coherence. Writers Tobe Otuogbodor and Ayoyemi Adeyemi show flashes of imagination, but the story needed more time, more shaping, more logic, more heart. By the end, the film leaves you with raw ingredients of a compelling supernatural story, but no satisfying dish. 

Rating: 1.5/5

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3

The post “Ms. Kanyin” Review: Jerry Ossaiʼs Wannabe Horror Flick is Forgettable first appeared on Afrocritik.

Does the AMVCA reflect the true diversity and excellence of African cinema, or does it merely reward the loudest voices in the room?

By Joseph Jonathan 

The 11th edition of the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA), held on May 10th, 2025, in Lagos, was, as always, a spectacle of fashion, fame, and celebration. Over the years, the AMVCA has become the most recognisable award ceremony for film and television in Nigeria and indeed, all of Africa. 

But beneath the glitz and glamour lies a recurring question: how effectively does the event honour the artistic and technical excellence it claims to celebrate? This year’s ceremony once again stirred applause, raised eyebrows, and reignited long-standing concerns about credibility and direction.

Production-wise, the event delivered what one has come to expect: sleek stage design, well-lit red carpet moments, live music performances, a soulful in memoriam segment, and a meticulous flow of segments that reflect the polish of a MultiChoice–backed show. Impressively, the show began right on schedule at 7pm, which is a rarity for many Nigerian events and a mark of growing professionalism.

IK Osakioduwa, the show’s long-time host, brought his usual energy and charisma, and made jokes that took jabs at guests, occasionally dipping into uncomfortable territory. 16-year-old co-host, David Oke, was a refreshing addition to the night, bringing sincerity and youthful presence to the stage. Together, they had a decent rapport, delivering some of the most engaging moments of the night.

However, despite the overall polish, there were cracks beneath the surface. The stage management was not always at its best, from technical issues like obvious teleprompter glitches disrupting the smoothness of the speeches delivered by those who presented the awards, to presenters forgetting to announce the winner of what should have been the second biggest award of the night. 

Moreso, the decision to introduce a talking parrot as a time regulator for acceptance speeches fell flat. Intended as a quirky device, the parrot’s loud interjections—often poorly timed—came across as corny and tacky, breaking the emotional rhythm of acceptance speeches rather than keeping them succinct.

For all its branding as a celebration of African storytelling, the AMVCA has increasingly leaned into celebrity and fashion culture. This year was no different. More social media content circulated about who wore what than who won what. While glamour has its place, this imbalance contributes to the perception that the awards are more a lifestyle event than a cinematic one.

This perception may or may not have something to do with the glaring absence of at least half of the night’s winning actors and filmmakers, depriving the audience of the heartfelt speeches that make award events worth watching. In the acting categories, the Best Lead Actress and Best Supporting Actor had representatives pick up their awards. The Best Director did not make it, neither did the producers who won Best Movie and Best Scripted Series. 

That leads us to the bigger question of the credibility of the awards itself. As expected, outcomes this year were a mixed bag. Lisabi: The Uprising which was the most nominated film on the night (ten), emerged as a dominant force, sweeping awards for Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, and Best Indigenous Language Film (West Africa). 

Lisabi: The Uprising is easily one of the most divisive Nollywood films from last year, as audiences can’t seem to agree on its merits. However, it is important to note that when conversations about the awards wins are brought up, it is usually within the context of other nominated films. Hakeem Effect won Best Makeup for Lisabi: The Uprising, but considering the fact that his makeup work in two other projects (Aníkúlápó: Rise of the Spectre and Seven Doors) were also nominated in the same category, one begins to wonder if indeed his best work won. 

I had planned to write a whole paragraph explaining why I think Seven Doors should have won the Best Indigenous Language Film (a category that features both film and series nominations) until I recalled it was an audience voting category. Nevertheless, the AMVCA can at least explain what that category really is about. 

Are audiences voting for the best use of an indigenous language in a film or the best film in an indigenous language? 

In the Best Scripted Series category, Clarence Petersʼ Inside Life clinched the award, and it is difficult to understand why. While the show had promise and started out well, it took a nosedive from around the third episode. In a category that had better written shows like Seven Doors, Princess on a Hill, and ChetaʼM, the credibility of Inside Lifeʼs win is questionable. For a category decided by the jury, it seems as though they were looking to spread award wins rather than just reward cinematic excellence. 

What does the Trailblazer Award mean, and how does its recipient get decided? These have been the questions on my mind since Kayode Kasum clinched the award on Saturday night. Like most viewers, I struggle to understand the rationale for awarding Kasum with the award because the last time a director (C. J. “Fiery” Obasi) won it in 2015, he had just a debut feature to his name. 

Kasum, on the other hand, has been in the industry for almost a decade with over 20 films credited to him as director. When you look at past winners of the award, it is understandable why audiences liken it to the Headies Next Rated, hence the confusion over Kasum’s win. 

In what was the larger joys of the night, Freedom Way deservedly won Best Movie and Best Writing (Movie), but it begs the question: how did the best movie get only one acting nomination (Best Supporting Actor), no directing nomination, and only two nominations in the technical categories (Sound/Sound Design and Score/Music)?

There is also the question of representation for non-Nigerian films. A Tanzanian series, Wa Milele?, won Best Unscripted Series while a Kenyan series, Untying Kantai, took home Best Writing (Series). South African film, Inkabi, picked up the award for Best Editing, and it is not surprising, considering that many of Nollywood’s big budget projects rely on their South African counterparts for post-production expertise. 

Yet, there is a sense that the continued underrepresentation of Francophone, Lusophone, and North African cinema (especially in the major categories) undermines the supposed ‘continental’ feel of the AMVCA. While there were token nods to South African and Kenyan entries in the major categories, there is almost no expectation for these films to win their categories as the overall flavour remains predominantly Nigerian and Anglophone.

It’s worth asking: does the AMVCA reflect the true diversity and excellence of African cinema, or does it merely reward the loudest voices in the room? The answer is complicated. 

On one hand, it offers a rare platform for African filmmakers to be seen, validated, and celebrated on a regional stage. On the other hand, the curation of nominees often leaves much to be desired and reflects biases of platform affiliation, language, and proximity to Lagos, the de facto capital of African entertainment. 

Despite what anyone thinks or feels about the AMVCA, one truth remains—that it reflects the aspirations of an industry still wrestling with its identity, value systems, and place in the global film conversation.

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.

The post AMVCA 2025: What Are We Really Celebrating? first appeared on Afrocritik.

In Nollywood, a growing number of writer-director pairings are leaving their mark, not just through individual hits but through sustained partnerships

By Joseph Jonathan 

In the world of film, few things are as powerful or as important as creative collaboration. A compelling script needs a visionary director to bring it to life, just as a director relies on a sharp, coherent screenplay to guide the soul of their film. The magic of filmmaking happens when these two forces align, creating stories that resonate deeply with audiences.

As six-time Oscar-winning director, Alan Parker, once said, “Filmmaking is a collaborative art form. No filmmaker in history ever made a film on his, or her, own. Let’s face it, even Leonardo needed a little help painting “The Last Supper”, but Federico needed a hundred people to help him make “La Dolce Vita””. This statement rings especially true in Nollywood, where a growing number of writer-director pairings are leaving their mark, not just through individual hits but through sustained partnerships that have defined genres, launched careers, and redefined storytelling. 

In this listicle, we spotlight some of Nollywood’s most prolific writer-director duos: those who have worked together on three or more projects together. And because some magic only needs two chances to spark, we’ve also included honourable mentions.

Isaac Ayodeji & Taiwo Egunjobi

In Ibadan (2021), All Na Vibes (2021), Crushed Roses (2022), A Green Fever (2023), The Fire and The Moth (2025)

Having worked as co-writers on Dwindle (2021), the duo teamed up for Egunjobi’s directorial debut, In Ibadan, and have never looked back since. They have gone on to become one of the most exciting writer-director teams in Nigeria’s indie film space. Their collaborations explore youth, rebellion, and societal decay with raw energy and poetic realism. With each film, their collaboration adds a new layer to its evolving cinematic vision.

Collins Okoh & Funke Akindele

Omo Ghetto: The Saga (2020), A Tribe Called Judah (2023), She Must Be Obeyed (2023), Everybody Loves Jenifa (2024), Finding Me (2025)

Funke Akindele is rightly called Nollywood’s box office queen, but behind some of her biggest box office hits is the pen of Collins Okoh. Together, they’ve shaped stories that balance broad comedy with strong emotional stakes, speaking directly to Nigeria’s urban middle class.

Akinlabi Ishola & Funke Akindele

A Tribe Called Judah (2023), She Must Be Obeyed (2023), Everybody Loves Jenifa  (2024), Finding Me (2025)

Another key collaborator in Akindele’s camp, Ishola’s scripting style leans into contemporary themes and multi-character ensembles. As a frequent collaborator with Collins Okoh and Funke Akindele, their work together signals a production model built on trust and consistency.

Tunde Babalola & Kunle Afolayan

October 1 (2014), The CEO (2016), Mokalik (2019), Diamonds in the Sky (2019), Tenant of the House (2019), Citation (2020), Aníkúlápó (2022), Ijogbon (2023)

As the most prolific on this list, Tunde Babalola and Kunle Afolayan’s partnership is responsible for some of Nollywood’s most ambitious and globally recognised films. Whether it’s period dramas or political thrillers, their work is marked by intelligent scripting and cinematic ambition which is evident in the critical acclaim which most of their work have received. 

Kemi Adesoye & Kunle Afolayan

The Figurine (2009), Phone Swap (2012), Ọmụgwọ (2017), A Naija Christmas (2021)

Kemi Adesoye is known for her character-driven narratives, and with Afolayan’s experienced cinematic eye, this duo has delivered both commercial hits and critical favourites. Their early work together, The Figurine is one of the films that helped define the New Nollywood era.

Shola Dada & Kunle Afolayan

Roti (2017), The Bridge (2017), Aníkúlápó: Rise of the Spectre (2024).

Shola Dadaʼs style sees her bring a reflective, sometimes spiritual touch to her scripts. When paired with Afolayan’s epic vision, their stories offer layered portrayals of life, love, and loss.

Toluwani Obayan Osibe & Kayode Kasum

This Lady Called Life (2020), Ponzi (2021), Something Like Gold (2023)

This pair excels at telling intimate stories that are socially relevant. Their work spans dramedy to romance, each time focusing on everyday characters with relatable struggles and triumphs.

Stephen Okonkwo & Kayode Kasum

Soole (2021), Obara’m (2022), Ajosepo (2024)

Stephen Okonkwo and Kasum’s collaborations blend traditional motifs with modern storytelling. Their films often explore family, tradition, and the tension between the old and the new.

Frances Okeke & Biodun Stephen

Mother Love (2019), Hell Cat (2019), Carpe Diem (2021)

Through their collaborative work, Frances Okeke and Biodun Stephen have carved a niche for themselves in the melodrama and romantic genres. This duo are able to tell emotionally resonant stories that spotlight female leads and complex relationships.

Toyin Abraham & Adebayo Tijani

Alakada 2 (2013), Ijakumo: The Born Again Stripper (2022), Alakada: Bad and Boujee (2024)

Toyin Abraham wears many hats: writer, actor, producer, and in Adebayo Tijani, she has found a director who translates her vision to screen with flair. Their collaborations are usually marked by humour, satire, and social commentary.

Femi Adebayo & Tope Adebayo

Jelili (2011), King of Thieves (2022), Jagun Jagun (2023)

As the sons of the legendary Adebayo Salami, this brother duo have brought Yoruba epic storytelling to the mainstream. From comedy to mythic stories, their creative synergy is rooted in cultural pride and folktale tradition.

Adebayo Tijani & Tope Adebayo

Jagun Jagun (2023), Crossroads (2024), Seven Doors (2024)

Adebayo Tijani and Tope Adebayo are another duo committed to pushing the boundaries of traditional storytelling in the Yoruba epic genre. Their films usually blend high-concept production design with grounded Yoruba folklore to create memorable cinematic experience for audiences. 

Musa Jeffrey David & Moses Inwang

Lockdown (2021), Merry Men 3: Nemesis (2023), Blood Vessel (2023)

This duo dive into genre filmmaking with assured confidence, as they often explore social commentary in the thriller and drama genres. David and Inwangʼs collaborations are often characterised by its ensemble cast. 

Jennifer Nkemdilim Eneanya & Daniel Oriahi

Zena (2019), Simple People (2020), The Mismatched (2021), False Doors (2021)

One of the most underrated pairings, their work embraces the quirky, and the emotional. Oriahi’s bold direction meets Eneanya’s abstract but realistic scripts to produce consistently surprising work.

Honourable Mentions

These writer-director pairings have shown early promise or made memorable contributions with just two films:

• Ozioma Nwughala & Biodun Stephen – Tough Love (2018), Slay Queen (2019)
• Joy Isi Bewaji & Biodun Stephen – Seven and a Half Dates (2018), Porbeni (2021)
• Ijenebe Anwuri & Biodun Stephen – Truth (2019), Butterflies (2021)
• Omo Ojeiwa & Kayode Kasum – Dognapped (2017), Oga Bolaji (2018)
• Ife Olujuyigbe & Kayode Kasum – What About Us (2024), Reel Love (2025)
• Chinaza Onuzo & Omoni Oboli – Moms at War (2018), Love is War (2019)
• Chinaza Onuzo & Tope Oshin – New Money (2018), Up North (2018)
• Tunde Babalola & Bolanle Austen-Peters – Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (2024), House of Ga’a (2024)
• Anthony Kehinde Joseph & Moses Inwang – Merry Men 2 (2019), Bad Comments (2020)
• Nicole Asinugo & Ramsey Nouah – Living in Bondage: Breaking Free (2019), Rattlesnake: The Ahanna Story (2020)
• Vanessa Kanu & Daniel Oriahi – Sylvia (2018), The Weekend (2024)

Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @JosieJp3.

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