Back to selectionLady, the titular lead of Olive Nwosu's neo-noir feature debut about a taxi driver's gradual solidarity with a group of Lagosian sex workers, possesses a piercing gaze. She's not scanning you as much as she is preemptively fending you off. In her red taxi she stalks the nocturnal streets of the largest city in Nigeria, very much her own person, the only lady cab driver in a city on the verge of revolution around eradicating gasoline subsidies.
Some years ago, Akinola Davies Jr received a short story written by his brother Wale, who was then living in Nigeria and working as a screenwriter for TV. The result of a writing exercise, Wale Davies's story was titled My Father's Shadow. "He sent it to me, really unprompted," Davies Jr remembers. "I cried, as you can imagine, because our father passed when we were really young. I would have been 20 months and I think he would have been about three years old." That story would become Davies Jr's Bafta-nominated debut feature My Father's Shadow, a magical portrait of two young brothers enjoying a rare day out in Lagos with their beloved, enigmatic father, told from the boys' perspective.
Inua Ellams was walking through the streets of Lagos, the bustling former capital of Nigeria, when he began noticing a recurring phrase, spray-painted on to the sides of homes. This house is not for sale, it read. Beware of 419. The number refers to section four, chapter 19 of the Nigerian criminal code, which specifically deals with fraud obtaining goods or property by false pretences