Berlinale 2026, Lady, Olive Nwosu
Lady, 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. Played with fiery commitment by Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, Lady doesn’t even necessarily care that she’s a “woman in a man’s world,” or if she lives up to any cultural norms of femininity. Those expectations are too facile. Lady has a past she carries with her like armor even as she cares for an older female neighbor or affectionately pays extra to a little girl street vendor. No one else better get in her path. But one day, Pinky, a friend from her heavy past, shows up at her doorstep, asking for a favor. Lady’s nights are about to get a lot more charged, a lot more sexed, and of course, dangerous.
“Colorful” and “vibrant” are overused cinematic and festival descriptors of metropolises in the Global South and Sub-Saharan Africa. Portraying metropolises authentically is something Nwosu feels strongly about. Lady premiered at Sundance where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting Ensemble. While Nwosu admits she did write, at least in part, for festival audiences, she insists on guarding her insider perspective. She may have studied at Columbia University and currently resides in Britain, but she was born and raised in Nigeria. As such, Lady should speak to people in Lagos, too—especially the sex workers, among whom she conducted her research.
I spoke to Nwosu a few days before the film’s European premiere at the 76th Berlinale. She told me about the influence of Jane Campion, how the O.G. Taxi Driver served as a reference and her contrast with another well-known British-African female filmmaker. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Filmmaker: Since Lady premiered at Sundance and is now getting its international premiere in Berlin, I had a question about this idea of the film festival circuit and international films. When you were thinking about and writing this film, did you have a goal to screen it for a festival audience? And if you did, did you have a particular idea of how you wanted Lagos or urban West Africa to be represented?
Nwosu: I did. My first film Troublemaker played at Clermont Ferrand in France, and then my second short Egúngún played at TIFF and Sundance. So I’d done the festival circuit. And something I had noticed in watching films [that deal with] African history is the way that the continent has been shot. There’s often this kind of pastoral ideal and rural characters and settings. I was intrigued by that history, a lot of it coming from Francophone Africa in terms of the African festival circuit. So with Lady, I wanted to do something that really subverted that, that spoke about a contemporary city, a modern city, that was unafraid to lean into genre elements, that felt like a strong representation of what Nollywood also has to offer, that a local audience would also enjoy [in addition to the one on the] festival circuit. That was kind of the conceptualization of the film.
Filmmaker: Growing up in India surrounded by Bollywood, which is the Hindi-language cinema around Mumbai, I realized later that India’s independent films have nothing to do with Bollywood because, first of all, independent films come from all regions of India. I was wondering whether you too are irked by similar comparisons. If people talk about Nigerian cinema, do they automatically talk about Nollywood? If so, is that something that bothers you or is Nollywood influence something you actively work to bring into your films?
Nwosu: I think it used to bother me, to be honest, and these days it doesn’t. I have a real appreciation now for Nollywood. It’s such an enterprising industry, self-started and is imperfect, certainly. It could do with more development time and more financing. But again, it’s local people who are using the resources they have to tell local stories. I really appreciate that. There’s also independent film. My hope is that it’s not so separate where independent film becomes foreign-facing only and Nollywood is serving a local market. I feel like you can have a rich independent ecosystem that’s also speaking locally. That’s what I’m hoping Lady can be. It’s not afraid to deal with complexity. It’s not afraid to look at darkness, but it’s in conversation with local authenticity. Not to say that others aren’t, but the language is accessible.
Filmmaker: What other films from the Sub-Saharan African region or West Africa do you see this film in conversation with? The one that comes to mind is On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.
Nwosu: It’s not something I’ve consciously thought about, to be honest. I love Rungano’s work. It’s beautiful. And she’s one of few British-African filmmakers. So in that sense, I’m a conversant with her work. I feel that there’s a slight difference in that I was born in Nigeria and was in Nigeria the first 17 years of my life. So I think Rungano has this amazing lens of observation that’s slightly from the outside. In Guinea Fowl, for example, there’s an amazement at local culture. Whereas with Lady, I hope that we’re sitting inside the city and inside Lady’s character, and viewing Lagos through that point of view. So in that sense, I think there is a separation between the two films. A very different film is [Wanuri Kahiu’s] Rafiki. That felt like there was a vibrance and understanding of local culture that was exciting, even though it was looking at people on the margins.
Filmmaker: You were in the Sundance Feature Film Lab with Lady. What was the biggest story change that is now reflected in the film?
Nwosu: I loved being at the Lab. I had amazing mentors. I met Jane Campion there and she has been an amazing champion of the film and really encouraged me to lean into the interiority of Lady. The second big part of the Lab that I really took away from was the emphasis on research. The Lab was in two parts. After the first part, I went back home and spent two months with sex workers in Lagos, interviewing them, hanging out with them and writing a new version of the script. That really just deepened the architecture of the world. The rhythms of the group of women really comes from that experience, their camaraderie, their emotional vividness. That beautiful mix of freedom and darkness—the complexity—was real. These are women who are making economic choices, who are shamed in Nigeria but also have this freedom because they’ve done the most taboo thing and they’re actually often in systems that are less oppressive than the family structures they came from. There was something in that dichotomy and in that sense of agency that I really loved. That came from the research process after the Lab.
Filmmaker: About the research process, how do you go about doing it?
Nwosu: I was lucky I had a local fixer who was already kind of integrated into the community. I think especially for communities like that, finding someone local who they trust as a way in is important. Specifically with sex workers, there’s a lot of fear around police. So building that trust is the biggest part of it. I found that not many people had ever asked the women questions. There were just lots of assumptions. So once they felt comfortable, they very quickly started to open up. They were hungry to
Source: filmmakermagazine.com