Christmas Special: 5 Nigerian Film Journos Discuss Their Favourite Coverages of 2025

Top Nigerian film journalists share their favourite 2025 coverage moments, from To Kill A Monkey controversy to indie discoveries and festival highlights.

As part of our Christmas Day publications, and in celebration of a wonderful year in Nigerian cinema, we reached out to some of the top voices covering the scene this year to learn about their favourite moments of coverage. Their responses ranged from mainstream favourites to indie gems and forward-thinking festivals. Read on to find out more and consider watching one or two of their recs for your holiday pleasure. Merry Christmas once again!

Jeffrey Ini-Abasi, What Kept Me Up: In terms of the general media response to a film, I’ll say it’s a tie between To Kill A Monkey (not a film, but I had to include it) and The Herd. The conversations around TKAM, mostly driven by Seyi’s review in Culture Custodian, covered a wide range of the show’s wins and losses, and why I liked it is that many times these conversations are critics and media folks talking to themselves, but this time, the general public participated robustly. It helped prove that the public might not have the fancy words to string together a 1000-word review, but they know what they like and don’t like.

I wrote a lot of reviews this year, but I think my review of The Herd stands out to me because of the political implications. It’s also part of a broader conversation about violence in Nigerian cinema and how it used to be a tool for taking a political stance in films like Saworoide, but now it just exists for an aesthetic purpose stripped of any political weight in films like Brotherhood. With The Herd, it understands that the violence is built into our systems and determines who has power over whom. Even though the film hesitates to take a real stand, I liked that it decided to take on a story many will run from. Props for that, especially for a first-time director.

Praise Vandeh, Nollywire:

A film I wrote about and couldn’t stop talking about is Dika Ofoma’s Something Sweet. For WKMUp, I wrote about how Ogranya could be Nollywood’s latest heartthrob. I like Something Sweet because it’s a nice romantic comedy and specifically because of Dika and Ogranya. He [Ogranya] is so amazing in it. He has such a heartthrob quality; aside from having such a killer face, his eyes were so amazing. Also, the film was so funny, and he had so much chemistry with Michelle Dede. I watched it a couple of times, kept talking about it, and spoke to Dika about it for 49th Street. 

Remi  Akinwande, 49th Street: 

Dika Ofoma’s God’s Wife and Tai Egunjobi's The Fire and the Moth are two pieces of Nigerian cinema I enjoyed writing about this year. For Dika Ofoma, it's about form and fundamentals executed well. Splinters of Italian neorealism are present in some of his shot choices and compositions. He relies on symbols and the image to depict the tug-of-war between duty, tradition, sin and Eastern Nigerian catholicism. It's very akin to Bresson’s The Diary of a Country Priest in terms of its depiction of God's silence. There's also a theological similarity to Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Bar a few exceptions, there's a case to be made for Tai Egunjobi's The Fire and the Moth as what we might dare bestow the genre moniker "naija noir". To paraphrase Bataille, crime is a fact of the human species — Egunjobi does a sterling job in entrenching his philosophy and characters in this quote.

I think under the auspices of Culture custodian, Seyi Lasisi's coverage of AFRIFF and a lot of cinema outside the margins of the mainstream ecosystem [was memorable]. The ‘why’ is very perceptible. Film journalism is currently bereft of any discernible merit, but he does his best to write against the grain, despite the civil war on erudition and critical thought. Akoroko Magazine is also doing salient work.

Seyi Lasisi, Culture Custodian: 

The first was my review of Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill A Monkey. It’s such an interesting moment because, from a personal POV, I deal a bit with anxiety, and when the review came out, there was this divisive response, and in my anxiety-ridden mind, I was panicking. At some point, I was even scared to the bar, ‘cause I was worried – “What are people going to say?” It was such an interesting moment because it just goes to show that people are reading my work and having solid conversations about it, which is one of the essentials of journalism, or maybe they didn’t even think about it before, and it was my work that nudged them. 

Also, it was interesting from the POV of being a film critic and journalist in that I’d written essays this year where I sort of suggested that we have a nonexistent film culture in this country in terms of things like people vigorously and passionately discussing cinema and people wearing merchandise of their favourite Nollywood characters. But linking it to a film like Omoni Oboli’s Love in Every Word, some of those conversations, as intellectually bereft as they might be, were still interesting to see Nigerians talking about Nigerian films, and suggest the possibility of having a film culture. 

When I saw the comments [on TKAM], I knew I couldn’t respond to everybody. So, I put up a tweet/thread, and one of those things I mentioned is that we need to keep having conversations around Nigerian film and series because it is a way in which we build a film culture, interrogate our filmmakers, and hold them accountable for the art they make. 

The second would be my coverage of IFA for various interesting reasons. I’ve been a fan of IFA (Ibadan Indie Film Awards) for the longest [known Chukwu Martins for a while], but I hadn’t been able to attend physically. I was attending physically first as a journalist, second as a cinephile and from an industry POV, as someone who has written about the Nigerian indie film space, watching it outside Lagos. Lagos can be a bubble, but going to Ibadan and seeing students, filmmakers coming together to watch and discuss Nigerian films just shows that, again, the film culture is growing. Although another nuance is whether it’s growing at a larger rate or on a small basis, the point IFA confirmed is that it [film culture] is growing. Another thing that made it an interesting coverage moment was that I attended the S16 Festival the following week, and this sort of motivated one of my favourite essays this year, “A Capsuled History of Indie Filmmaking in Nigeria and Alternative Screening Spaces.”

Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku, Afrocritik: Covering the S16 Film Festival might be it, because it had an interesting curation, and it was unsurprisingly the most organised Nigerian cinema event I attended this year.

As you settle in for the holidays, you should also re-read some of their essays from the year. And if you’d prefer to have that with a side of feel-good holiday movies, we’ve got you. Check out our Christmas viewing listicle here and December listicles here (Hollywood) and here (Nollywood).