Dika Ofoma’s first short film came about during a hiking trip in Enugu four years ago. He had been reading Syd Field’s The Foundations of Screenwriting and watching YouTube videos, learning to write a script. He told his friend and hiking partner Ugochukwu Onuoha, a photographer, who proposed a collaboration. Ofoma wrote about a 13-year-old girl sold into marriage to settle her father’s debts; Onuoha shot it and they called it Soma, and put it on YouTube. Viewers liked it. Their second collaboration, The Way Things Happen (2022), follows a young woman coming to terms with the loss of her lover. It drew a positive response from filmmakers they looked up to. One of them, CJ Obasi, reached out and asked why they didn’t submit it to festivals. Ofoma hadn’t considered it — he and Onuoha were simply toying with new skills, with no great ambition for the film.
That August, Ofoma wrote and directed A Japa Tale (2022), about a young couple with misaligned life goals who work to save their relationship. It was selected for the S16 Film Festival, co-helmed by Obasi, and with that came recognition. The following year, he put the film on YouTube, to positive reception, and now likes to joke that it made him “famous.” After the producer Blessing Uzzi saw Soma, the two worked on A Quiet Monday (2023), his first film with a budget. Set in the political unrest of Nigeria’s southeast region, the story sees two siblings, played by Uzoamaka Doris Aniunoh and Emmanuel Igwe, face danger when they defy the sit-at-home order by a secessionist group protesting the unlawful jailing of their leader.
Last year, Ofoma produced two more short films dealing with women in traditional Igbo society. In Nkemakonam, a community casts out a young girl who gets pregnant out of wedlock. And in God’s Wife, a newly widowed woman, still mourning, must navigate the sexual advances of her late husband’s brother, at the risk of being ousted from her home. God’s Wife was acclaimed and played at the S16 Festival.
Like his influences Abbas Kiarostami, Vittorio De Sica, Asghar Farhadi, and the Dardenne brothers, Ofoma’s short films focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people. “The lives of Nigerians are interesting enough and it’s during those mundane activities that the big moments happen,” he said. “In creating narrative or drama, I simply just think of how my character’s lives are, or can be upset, while carrying out their day-to-day mundane activities.” Currently in post-production is Obi Is a Boy, which he called “the most personal of my short films.”
In our interview, the 24-year-old filmmaker, journalist, and writer shares his inspirations and hopes for Nollywood.
What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
I’ve always just wanted to be one, or at least a storyteller in some form. I grew up surrounded by books and films and TV. I read and watched everything. Before DSTV, we had this other cable television where I could watch Bollywood films on a channel called B4U and then Hollywood films on MBC2, and, for Nollywood, we would rent or buy the home videos. I was just drawn to the stories in those films and liked how they made me feel, and I wanted to have that power to make people feel the sort of emotions I felt. One of my favourite pastimes as a kid was to gather my cousins and friends in our sitting room to reenact some of the films we watched, and I remember that I would get upset if they forgot their lines, because how could they, when I knew everyone’s lines?
You have said that the inspiration for God’s Wife came “from a news article about a widow ostracised by her in-laws.” Were you actively looking for a story at the time?
I wasn’t actively looking for stories to tell. In fact, when I read the article, I didn’t think of making a film about it. I was just sad that women still have to endure this sort of oppression. I used to think it was in the past. But, yeah, it was in August of 2023, I was home in Enugu and bored. I had just finished post-production of A Quiet Monday and was just hungry to do something new. So, on this Saturday which would otherwise have been unremarkable, I was taking a walk and it just hit me: you have to tell this story. And when I got home, I opened my laptop and wrote the first draft.
Both A Quiet Monday and God’s Wife were made predominantly in Igbo, a language you’ve said you aren’t the most fluent in. Is this a deliberate attempt to consolidate the you who struggles with his native language? Is working in Igbo an effort to explore the complexities of linguistic identity — Arundhati Roy said that “language is that most private and yet most public of things” — or is it driven by other creative considerations? Does language influence your storytelling style?
Great question. I think the most honest answer is that everything I have made has been set in Enugu, and the primary language of most people who live in Enugu is Igbo. But I did experience something I would like to describe as an Igbo awakening when I moved to the Southeast for university, and I developed an interest in Igbo culture, and my identity as an Igbo person in the context of Nigeria started to matter to me, and maybe making my films in Igbo is how I express this interest. And, yes, I will continue to make films in Igbo as well as other languages. But it has to be in service to the story; it has to lend the story its truth. I was born and raised in the North and, in many ways, I consider myself a Northerner, and I cannot wait to tell stories set in the North and have my characters speak in Hausa.
I read your Substack piece on the Biafran War. Did the stories you were told spark your “Igbo awakening”?
They didn’t, really. I was a child when I learned those stories of the war. It just was an account of my father’s childhood, like the many other stories of his childhood he shared with me. What it mostly did was stir my imagination.
My Igbo awakening started in 2015 when I moved to Owerri for university. It was in the school library that I read Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country and The Trouble with Nigeria, and subsequently learned more about the war during a history class. What those readings and studying did was open my eyes to what it meant to be Igbo in the context of Nigeria, and it validated some of my experiences growing up in the North; I now had a language to grasp things that merely confused me.
But also, learning of the war and how my forebears survived, their ingenuity and resilience, filled me with a kind of chauvinistic pride; being Igbo suddenly became important to me. It was no longer just an identity I happened upon by the luck/chance of birth, it became a culture, a way of being that I wanted to fully participate in and be identified with.
How did you develop your characters for A Japa Tale? Did you struggle with time constraints — considering it’s 28 minutes — in bringing them to their fullest?
I’ve always been keen on stories around amicable breakups. I like to think that most breakup stories are like that. I like to think that the melodrama of infidelity as the reason for breakup is a rarity. And so the idea for A Japa Tale was really to look at a relationship that was ending or nearing its end, because it could no longer be. And I pulled from my own personal life: losing friends to the chase for a better life outside the shores of this country. I wanted to capture that grief, the loneliness, the sadness, the melancholy of it.
Even though most of your films have not been produced on a budget, you still manage to employ good actors. How are you able to find and pay them? You have a knack for working with actors just before they became breakout names — Onyinye Odokoro was in A Japa Tale and God’s Wife and is now in Netflix’s Baby Farm, Uzoamaka Doris Aniunoh was in A Quiet Monday and is the only actor with two spots in Open Country Mag’s list of the 10 best performances of 2024, on top of an AMVCA nomination.
I’ve always believed in paying actors and paying them their due. So with every actor I worked with, I made sure to pay them right. Sometimes it would take up more than half the budget, and I was fine with it, because I understand how a performance can make or mar a script. I find the actors because I watch other films and so I see the talent. Sometimes I have cast non-actors who turned out great for the roles, and it took rehearsing with them to get them ready.
Onyinye and Uzoamaka had put in the work and done great things before I met and worked with them, and it was because I had seen them being great in other films that I was drawn to them and wanted to have them in my own films. Uzoamaka had been acting for years, from MTV Shuga to the Sundance film Mami Wata. So I did nothing more than cast an actor whose talent was already clear.
A Quiet Monday was your first “real” collaboration with a producer. What was your experience having a budget for the first time? How does working with a producer differ from working solo?
It came with a peculiar kind of pressure: going from true guerrilla filmmaking and now working with a team, most of them more experienced than I am in filmmaking, and I had to lead them creatively. It was a good learning curve. It humbled me and reminded me that I had to keep at it, keep learning, keep growing. Working with a producer also means that you wouldn’t have to bear all the workload, that you’d be allowed to focus mainly on the creative parts of filmmaking, allowing the producer to worry about budget, logistics, and managing the production.
You’ve written about the stagnation of Nollywood, about its reliance on formulaic storylines and production methods that prioritize commercial success over artistic innovation; you described it as “clueless on what to do with storytelling beyond entertainment.” Years ago, we published a recommendation of book adaptations. How do you think Nollywood can move beyond this limitation? How are you approaching this problem as an indie filmmaker? What are you doing differently?
You know, when I wrote the article, I didn’t think that a few years afterwards I was going to be asked: Okay, you, what are you doing? I am having a laugh attempting to answer this question. But the truth is, I think we are all just too afraid of failing. It’s easier to follow methods that have proven to work. But it’s also an industry that is yet to figure out distribution, and filmmakers need to recoup investment. This doesn’t allow for risks or experiments. And this is why kudos go to filmmakers like Kemi Adetiba who were audacious enough to go against the norm and were successful. I am talking about her cinema run with the political thriller King of Boys, at a time when we were made to believe that only slapstick comedies could be blockbusters.
I’ve been making short films and it doesn’t come with the financial pressure of feature films or other long forms of filmmaking. So I’m hoping that I am a lot less afraid of failing and that I can bet on myself more when I eventually walk that route.
I think I already attempted to proffer solutions in the article you cited. But the truth is, I don’t know. I think that’s a question each filmmaker needs to ask themselves. People are making films for different reasons and I cannot speak for them. My understanding of filmmaking is that it is an art form, and art serves as expression. And so what I am doing differently, what I am doing with my filmmaking, is to express myself. I mean, I don’t go into storytelling trying to challenge a problem. I’ve never thought, Oh, Nollywood doesn’t tell important stories the right way, so I am going to. I have never concerned myself with that. I just tell the sort of stories I am drawn to and tell them in the best way that I can. I haven’t faced any challenges in doing that. ♦
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