Features

In the 2000s, she was only another superstar in Nollywood. Now she is the most nominated actress in the histories of both the AMAAs and the AMVCAs, the industry’s two biggest awards. For Open Country Mag’s first film cover, we look into her reinvention from stage to screen, 25 years after she emerged on the scene.

As Paramount’s Country Director for Nigeria, Bada Akintunde-Johnson wants to model a new mode of business and creative leadership. “You can’t exert the highest possible positive influence on people without connecting with them on a deep personal level,” he said in this extensive interview — our first in a series with industry leaders.

In this excerpt from Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Between Starshine and Clay, the Nobel laureate and his friend Henry Louis Gates, Jr. remember another friend, the late Toni Morrison. “Those who have experienced genuine friendship should appreciate how very lucky they are,” he said. “It’s almost a mystical thing.”

Before his manuscript won the 2022 Sillerman Prize, Tares Oburumu faced seemingly interminable hardship in his personal life. “The act of survival, for me, is a lot more inspirational than anything,” he said, “trying to put yourself in a place where there’s no place for you.”

The fantasy revenge thriller is Nigeria’s first indigenously produced film to go to Sundance, a first it already notched at Venice. “We tapped into something beyond us while making this one,” said producer Oge Obasi. “Hopefully, that opens more doors for Nigerian filmmakers,” said director C.J. Obasi.

Created by Didier Lacoste and Joy Fleury, with screenplay by Ukamaka Olisakwe, Adachioma Ezeano, and Jude Idada, it will focus on the two Franco-Dahomean Wars of 1890-94. The story, said Olisakwe, looks at “how this impacted lives and the Kingdom’s long rivalry with its neighbors.”

Seminal storyteller of queer love, satirist of race, literary icon.

Pearl of the Sea and KARIBA started as animation but ended as graphic novels—the former the first by Triggerfish Studios. Graphic novels are a “three-dimensional experience of literature,” said their publisher, Catalyst Press’ Jessica Powers. “Maybe we’re on the cusp of a trend across the African continent.”

The enigmatic American-Somali novelist, poet, and academic on her new memoir The White Mosque, literary hybridity, and the “dystopian hypocrisy” of social media.

The brief feature, by director John Adekoje, works memory, spirituality, and pain. “That’s indicative of the growth women have access to now,” said Egbuson-Akande, “to process our pain and become stronger, and transform, ascend.”

The Enugu-based hub, whose exhibitions, screenings, and lecture series have drawn 7,000 visitors, is, executive director Iheanyi Igboko says, “grooming a generation of young people who are not only grounded in their history and culture but proud of their Igbo identity.”

Awaiting Trial finds the emotional core of police brutality and the End SARS protests in Nigeria. It is “a deliberate telling of the consequences of the death and damage dealt on all of us,” said narrator and executive producer Chude Jideonwo.

“Love is a good point for telling stories because it brings out all the other emotions of pain, happiness, joy, euphoria, and sadness,” she said of the warmly received Ndani TV web series. “And it’s what our audience—a lot of them—want in their lives.”

Nigerian literature has the global acclaim that Nigerian cinema need only draw from. But will filmmakers look?

Collins Okoh, co-writer of the ₦636 million box office juggernaut starring Funke Akindele, tells us about his research of ghetto culture and the need for creative freedom for screenwriters. “I never thought that a gun would be referred to as ‘English’ until I started writing the movie,” he said.

The multidisciplinary designer, whose clients include NASA, UNESCO, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, makes work that is “unusual and unique.”

Chinny Ukata and Astrid Madimba on how their “conversational approach to the book and podcast allows us to reach audiences who wouldn’t typically engage with such content.”

These “conversations are as absurd as they are beautiful,” writes the poetry series’ managing editor Precious Okpechi. “This is what literature does: bare life’s absurdity and beauty.”

Each of the five fellows will receive N50,000.

The debut Nigerian author’s short story collection, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, has seen him compared to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith and praised by Damon Galgut.