Damilola Orimogunje Is Nationalist With His Films

In October 2020, Damilola Orimogunje’s feature-length directorial debut, For Maria Ebun Pataki, premiered at the Beyond Nollywood strand at Film Africa Festival. In 2022, it landed on Netflix and attracted critical and commercial acclaim. Orimogunje, who is no stranger to the international film festival circuits courtesy of his shorts, Losing My Religion, Mo, and others, then went silent after the monumental success of For Maria. During this period, he was workshopping a script at Nouveau Cinema and  Sud Ecriture. In 2023, he resurfaced as the producer of Babatunde Apalowo’s feature-length directorial debut, All the Colours of the World are Between Black and White. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, won the coveted Teddy Award for Best Feature Film, and began an almost-unprecedented international festival tour. Now, in 2026, Orimogunje is back in the news with Dear Ajayi, the script he had been developing. The project will have its world premiere at the 23rd edition of Giornate degli Autori (Directors/Authors’ Days), the independent sidebar of the Venice Film Festival. 

Still from Dear Ajayi.

Dear Ajayi was shot in Ibadan after eight years of nurturing the script through an international development pipeline in Africa, Europe, and North America. Orimogunje’s Dear Ajayi unfolds in the late 1990s in Southwestern Nigeria, tracing the fragile reunion of two sisters brought back under one roof by the death of their father and their mother’s sudden illness. Dear Ajayi is co-produced by Orimogunje and Bose Oshin (Eyimofe, Nigerian Prince) under the banner of 2o9ine Films in co-production with Depth and Optics Productions. K.C. Obiajulu is the cinematographer, and the film stars Bimbo Akintola, Tosin Adeyemi, William Benson, Uzoamaka Power, Lanre Hassan, Michelle Dede, Antar Laniyan, Tope Tedela, Chioma Omeruah, Baaj Adebule, Iya Rainbow, Kalu Ikeagwu, and others. 

Ahead of the film’s premiere, the director hosted an intimate trailer preview entitled Dear Ajayi: Before Venice. As excitement heightens for the film’s premiere, Culture Custodian spoke with the director about the preview, the overt commercialization of the Nigerian film industry, artistic longsuffering and financing, and the Oscars dream.

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

First, why was it important to host a trailer preview? 

It was important to me to share the film first with people at home, particularly our creative community, before taking it to Venice and the rest of the world. Dear Ajayi has been a nine-year journey, and so much of it has happened within our own creative ecosystem, with people who have supported the film, worked on it, believed in it, and in many cases, lived through parts of the journey with me.

The trailer preview was therefore less about a conventional launch and more about creating a moment of connection. I wanted people who understand the context in which the film was made to see it first, experience it together, and have a conversation around the work before the international journey began.

Dear Ajayi is Nigeria’s first Giornate degli Autori selection. What does this mean to you and other art-conscious Nigerian and African filmmakers? And what does that, from a national and international perspective, actually change practically in terms of festival strategy, sales interest, and how Nigerian distributors are approaching the film? 

For me, it is an affirmation that you can make a deeply Nigerian film, rooted in our realities, languages, relationships, and contradictions, and still have it speak beyond Nigeria. But I also think the significance goes beyond Dear Ajayi. Every time an African film enters a new space, it potentially makes the next conversation a little easier for another filmmaker. 

Practically, Venice gives the film an important international positioning. It puts the film in conversation with programmers, distributors, sales agents, critics, and audiences who may not otherwise encounter it. It also creates a stronger foundation for the festival journey that follows and for conversations around international distribution and sales. But importantly, we still have to build the audience at home. The real test is not simply getting films to top film festivals, it is getting Nigerians to be aware of and see films like Dear Ajayi. 

You and the script benefited from the Festival Nouveau Cinéma and Sud Ecriture workshops. For a project that was supposed to be your debut feature film, how beneficial were these workshops? 

They were extremely important to the film’s development. When you’re developing a film, you can be very close to the material, and sometimes you don’t have enough distance to see what the story needs. Those workshops gave me the opportunity to put the script in front of people who were willing to challenge it, question my choices, and force me to articulate why certain things needed to exist. 

You mentioned that Dear Ajayi was supposed to be your debut feature-length film during the trailer preview. What necessitated the delay, and from an artistic standpoint, how will you reflect on it? 

There were practical realities of financing and production, but I don’t think the delay can be separated from the film’s artistic journey. There were moments when I wanted to make the film simply because I had written it, and there were other moments when I realised that I hadn’t completely understood the film yet. So the delay gave me something I didn’t necessarily know I needed at the time: distance. 

I was able to return to the story several times, and each time I was a different filmmaker and, hopefully, a different person. My understanding of the characters changed. My understanding of the relationships changed. Even my understanding of what I wanted the audience to feel changed. 

Damilola Orimogunje

Dear Ajayi is arriving almost a decade after For Maria. How much of that gap was about money versus the story not being ready? 

Money was certainly a significant part of it. Making independent films in Nigeria is difficult, and raising the financing required to make the film I wanted took time. But I wouldn’t say it was only about money. The story also needed time. Dear Ajayi has gone through several lives. There were versions of the film that I thought were finished, and then I would come back to them and realise something wasn’t quite right. 

I think the nine years were a combination of trying to finance an ambitious independent film, navigating the realities of making cinema outside the dominant commercial system, and waiting for the story and my own understanding of it to mature. For Maria Ebun Pataki, it was an important experience for me because it gave me confidence that my work could resonate. But I didn’t want to make Dear Ajayi simply to have another film. I wanted to make the film I felt I had to make. 

Nollywood film history was known for its diverse stories and genres. Old Nollywood filmmakers, who often operated in the dominant market, told varying stories in sharp contrast to what’s obtainable now. How did you think we got here? What factors led to the silent treatment given to independent and art-house-leaning projects? 

I think several things are happening at once. Nollywood has become much more industrialised, which is a good thing in many ways. But as the industry has grown, there has also been a stronger emphasis on what is immediately commercially predictable, what can be packaged, marketed, and expected to perform. 

The irony is that Nollywood’s history was built on experimentation. Those early films were made with very different resources, yet filmmakers told all kinds of stories. There was a willingness to take risks because the industry itself was still figuring out what it could be. As the market became more structured, certain formulas became more reliable. And when something works commercially, the market naturally wants more of it. The problem is when that becomes the only pathway. 

Independent and art-house films often require a different model. I don’t think the answer is to dismiss commercial cinema. There is space for both. A healthy film industry should produce the big commercial film, the genre film, the experimental film, the intimate family drama, and allow them to coexist. What concerns me is when we begin to measure the value of Nigerian cinema only by what is immediately profitable. Because then we risk losing the diversity that made Nigerian cinema so exciting in the first place. 

Dear Ajayi is coming to Nigerian cinema on November 13, 2026. What influenced this decision? Is it related to an Oscar qualification consideration or just a filmmaker wanting his film to have a national theatrical distribution? 

It is both. 

I have always wanted Dear Ajayi to have a proper theatrical life in Nigeria. The film was made here, it is about people here, and ultimately I want Nigerian audiences to experience it in a cinema with other people. The international journey is incredibly meaningful, but I never saw that as the end goal.