“A lot is going on in the Nigerian film space right now,” filmmaker Olive Nwosu tells me over Zoom on a crisp morning in Park City, Utah. “There are a lot of filmmakers who are doing really cool, interesting work.”
Nwosu is right. Filmmakers from across the West African country and its sprawling diaspora have been cropping up across the international festival circuit in recent years, dazzling audiences with a unique cinema culture that is political and inventive yet accessible. Recent examples include Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow and C. J. Obasi’s Mami Wata. Nwosu has now added to this growing canon with her debut feature, Lady, which world premieres today at the Sundance Film Festival.
Set and shot in Lagos, Nigeria, the film follows the eponymous Lady, a fiercely independent young cab driver, who dreams of escaping the unforgiving city for a peaceful existence living on the coast in Freetown, Sierra Leone. One of the very few female cab drivers on the road, she saves her earnings to fund her escape. But when a long-lost childhood friend, Pinky — now a sex worker — returns, she is pulled reluctantly into her orbit. Soon she’s driving a crew of glamorous, fun-loving women through the dangerous underbelly of Lagos nightlife.
With a synopsis like the above, readers and audiences who engage with Lady will, understandably, associate the film with the robust history of taxi-led titles like Martin Scorsese’s seminal picture, which Nwosu describes as a major influence: “I love Taxi Driver, it was always on my mind.” However, Nwosu’s core influences can be found closer to home.
“Lagos traffic is the symbol of Lagos,” Nwosu explains, discussing the origins behind the film’s story. “The madness and chaos of the road, the number of people who are on the street, the number of cars. The streets are such an emblem of the city, so it felt very key to start there and always return there to capture that insane energy that powers everyone.”
And the film does indeed hit the road. There are no green screens or digital inputs; Nwosu and her team actually shot full sequences on the highways of Lagos — a tremendous feat for a debut feature filmmaker working in a city widely known for its suffocating traffic.
“That was probably the first big question around production: How are we actually going to do this?” Nwosu says of the film’s road sequences. “We were lucky. We had a really good team on the ground. I had worked with my local producers before; they know so much about Lagos. We had the great combo of very strong local producers, an amazing DP, a great AD, and just lots of planning that got us through it.”
Olive Nwosu. Courtesy: Kory Mello.
Born in Nigeria and based in London, Nwosu developed Lady at Film4 after catching some buzz on the festival circuit with Egúngún (2021), her Columbia Film School graduation short, which screened at TIFF and Sundance. Nwosu’s other credits include the 2019 short Troublemaker, the first Igbo-language film on the Criterion Channel.
Lady was financed by the BFI, Film4, and Screen Scotland, with additional funding from Level Forward and Amplify Capital. The film was produced by Ossian International, Alex Polunin’s production company based in Glasgow, Scotland, John Giwa-Amu for Good Gate, and Stella Nwimo. Co-producers are Adé Sultan Sangodoyin and Jamiu Shoyode of the Lagos-based Emperium Films. HanWay is handling world sales.
Executive producers are Ama Ampadu for the BFI; David Kimbangi, Max Park, Ben Coren for Film4; Kieran Hannigan for Screen Scotland; Adrienne Becker, Brent Zachery, Abigail E. Disney for Level Forward; Demola Elebute, Oluseye Olusoga, Olufikayo Adeola for Amplify Capital; and Kamila Serkebaeva and Daniel Staut.
The film’s cast is led by an impressive group of newcomers: Jessica Gabriel, Ujah Amanda Oruh, and Tinuade Jemiseye, along with Binta Ayo Mogaji and Bucci Franklin. Like many great British contemporary filmmakers, Nwosu tells me she has often worked with non-professional actors.
“There’s something about finding people who, in some way, have the essence of the character I’ve written, and then inviting them into the process,” she explains, adding that she worked with local casting director Sukanmi Adebayo to find young women who were “navigating all the themes of the film” in their real lives.
“We started with tapes of 300 women, then we narrowed it down to about 100 who then came in for auditions, and from that, gradually, we took it down to 20 women,” Nwosu says of the film’s casting process.
“We then designed a four-day workshop where we invited the 20 women. The idea was to casually start to investigate the scenes. There were two women who I thought could be Lady, but Jess was always number one.”
With extended sequences on the busy highways of Lagos, sound plays a key role in advancing the film’s plot and leads the audience to its rousing conclusion. In her car, Jessica Gabriel’s Lady is an avid listener of DJ Revolution, a fictional radio DJ who lectures passionately about the struggles of modern-day life in Nigeria. The DJ functions in a similar form to Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Do the Right Thing, and here is voiced by Nigerian artist Seun Kuti, the youngest son of Afrobeats pioneer Fela Kuti.
“DJ Revolution is the announcer of the film’s grand thesis,” Nwosu explains. “I wanted to have someone who represented the political dialogue in Lagos. People are always arguing and debating, and I wanted that essence in the film.”
DJ Revolution communicates using Nigerian Pidgin English, like all of the film’s characters. Their dialogue is subtitled. I asked Nwosu, perhaps ungenerously with regard to the financiers on this project, whether language was an issue for potential backers when she was pitching the film. (English is also one of Nigeria’s official languages). Nwosu says it was not, and she couldn’t “imagine the film in regular English.”
“I’m trying to make something that really speaks from the inside of Lagos that can also sit on the global stage, so the local cast is important. The language is important. These are really some core elements that are non-negotiable for it to be authentic,” Nwosu says.
She adds: “I hope this is a film that people in Lagos will watch and can recognize, but can also travel widely and still feel interesting and specific.”
Lady screens today at the Library Center Theatre in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition and plays in Park City until Jan 30, after which the film will play the 2026 Berlinale. When asked if she had any first feature jitters, Nwosu cut a calm figure. Sundance, she says, is a natural launchpad for the film.
“The film was developed here with the Sundance lab. My short was here. So in many ways it feels very comfortable, and I feel really supported,” she says. “If I’m honest, I think if we were at another festival that I wasn’t so familiar with, it would be a little bit different.”
She adds: “It feels like bringing it home.”