C.J “Fiery” Obasi to Direct “The Boy Who Runs” and the Import for Ambitious Nigerian Filmmaker

Famed Mami Wata director C.J “Fiery” Obasi has announced his next feature project. The director is set to produce, direct, and co-write The Boy Who Runs, a biopic based on the life of the Ugandan athlete Julius Achon. Obasi will be co-writing the screenplay with Kirimi Kiage and Teddy Gitau, Kudi Maradzika as executive producer, and Mortinno Morton as co-producer. 

The new project is based on John Brant’s book, The Boy Who Runs: The Odyssey of Julius Achon and it will follows Achon’s journey from northern Uganda, where he was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, an extremist organization operating in Central and East Africa, to his rise as a national champion and NCAA athlete at George Mason University, and his later years inside the elite American running world of Nike in Oregon. 

Obasi’s filmography and career have sustained continuous towering leaps. In 2014, his debut feature Ojuju, a zero-budget zombie thriller, screened at the AFRIFF, winning the Best Nigerian Film award. O-Town, his sophomore feature, premiered at the 2015 AFRIFF and won the Achievement in Soundtrack prize at the African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA). His short film Hello, Rain, adapted from a Nnedi Okorafor’s story, premiered at the Oscar-qualifying Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2018 and screened at over fifty festivals, winning the Special Mention of the Jury at Fantasia and earning a BFI London Film Festival nomination. Fast forward to 2023, Obasi’s Mami Wata sailed to the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the coveted World Cinema Dramatic Cinematography Award before playing across the festival circuit. The film was Nigeria’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards and received nominations at the Independent Spirit and NAACP Image Awards. After Mami Wata, he began shooting La Pyramide: A Celebration of Dark Bodies, a diaspora, cross-continental, multicultural, mystical thriller, filmed in Salvador, Brazil, São Paulo, New Orleans, and Senegal. The film is a Nigeria-UK-US-Senegal-Brazil co-production and has appeared twice in the Red Sea Souk Project Market —first in development, then as a work-in-progress.

In April 2026, Obasi wrapped filming in London on A Blue Butterfly, a psychological drama produced by Stella Nwimo for Boudica Entertainment, before moving the production to Rwanda for a further two-week shoot. The film stars Steve Toussaint (House of the Dragon) and Sanaa Lathan (Succession), with additional cast including Lucian Msamati (Conclave), Anton Lesser (Andor), Eliane Umuhire, Andy Nyman, and Aggy K. Adams. Now, not only will he be writing and directing, his production company, Fiery Film, will be producing The Boy Who Runs in association with Swiss-based studio, 9 NIGHTS. 

Post-Mami Wata, Obasi’s filmography has expanded not just in artistic ambitions but also in its deliberate diversification across geography, genre, and collaborator networks. La Pyramide is a diaspora film rooted in Black Atlantic mythology. A Blue Butterfly is a London-and Rwanda-set character drama written by a British-Caribbean actor. The Boy Who Runs is a biopic of a Ugandan athlete produced with a Swiss studio. These projects don’t have the markings of a Nollywood film in strict conventional industrial framing. And it points at what Obasi is doing: the filmmaker is operating as an African filmmaker in the global auteur tradition, a filmmaker whose filmic ambitions aren’t tied or restricted by national industry affiliation and borders. 

The significance for other internationally ambitious Nollywood directors lies precisely in what Obasi has demonstrated as a viable pathway. The director is one of the rare Nigerian and African directors who have been able to operate outside national borders. The harder question is whether Obasi’s success, which combines his artistic and genre credibility with the Surreal16 Collective critical infrastructure, is genuinely replicable, or whether it is the product of an exceptionally particular vision that happened to arrive at the right moment. For the next director looking to map a similar path, Obasi’s filmography functions as proof of concept. What it does not resolve is the structural question of whether there are enough festival slots, co-production funds, and willing international partners to sustain more than one or two such careers at a time from within the Nigerian context.