"If no one wants to make space for me, I'm going to make space for myself."
3 weeks ago
Korede Azeez began her career at BBC Media Action as a sound recordist, camera operator and video editor, and in 2022 became one of six winners of the Netflix-UNESCO ‘African Folktales, Reimagined’ competition. Born in Lagos and raised in Enugu, she grew up on the folktales and fantasy stories of her childhood. She has gone on to build a body of work that pairs everyday Nigerian lives with a sustained focus on women, faith and communities that mainstream Nollywood rarely centres. Within a single year she moved from a Netflix short to two feature films. Her aim is easy to state and hard to achieve, she wants audiences to see Muslim characters, women in hijab and people from outside the usual Lagos-centred picture as ordinary, complicated human beings rather than stereotypes.Before Azeez was a filmmaker, she was a teenager cast in a secondary school series that never made it to air. I asked what she played. “Man, you’re taking me back many years now,” she laughed. “I think I was supposed to be maybe the assistant head girl or something.” She can’t recall the storyline, but the instinct behind it, being drawn to what happens on and behind a screen, never left her.
What she remembers more clearly is what she didn’t see. Growing up as a Muslim girl in the East of Nigeria, she felt like an outlier. She loved Hallmark films and Bollywood, but the faces on screen rarely resembled hers. “It wasn’t until I started watching Islam Channel as a teenager that I started seeing women in hijab,” she told me. When Muslims did appear in American films, they were terrorists. In Nollywood, “it’s always a gateman and his name is always Musa.”
So what motivates her to make films?
“Honestly, my motivation is putting underrepresented characters on screen, because I think it’s very important.”
It is a conviction shaped by lived experience. In a country where about half the population is Muslim, she asks how many Muslim characters appear on mainstream television. Her years in broadcast gave her a closer look. At the station where she worked, she was the first news host to appear on air in full hijab, and she remembers the debate that followed. We talked about another journalist who lost a high-profile collaboration over whether she could wear hijab on air. “You would think we would be past that in 2026,” Azeez said.
I pushed her on why this matters beyond visibility, and her answer was bigger than Nollywood. “I used to think that maybe one day we can achieve world peace,” she said. “Not that optimistic anymore. But I do think that we can make each other’s lives better if we just understood one another.” Her argument is that people who seem alien to us are easy to dismiss, and that the media has pushed that alienation onto Muslims and other minorities. Her remedy is to show the shared core. “I might dress in a different way from you, I believe differently from you, but at the core of it all, we are all human with similar fears, aspirations and desires.”On this, I am with Azeez. It is a remedy the industry has been slow to try. Media worldwide has only recently begun to take diversity and inclusion seriously, and Nollywood has for the most part, leaned on stereotypes of northerners, Muslims, and minority groups since its earliest days. Film is one of the most powerful tools for introducing audiences to lives unlike their own, and when it does so honestly, difference becomes much harder to dismiss.
That explains her pull towards everyday stories. “It’s in those moments that we really see who people are.”
Her first feature, It Blooms in June, shows that instinct at work. Written by Gabriel Odigiri and produced by Dotun Olakunri and Steve Gukas, the founders of the First Features project, an initiative that gives new directors training and funding for their first features, the film follows Mira, a seventeen-year-old who has lived a sheltered life with her father since her mother’s death. As she prepares for college, a friendship with the boy next door, Ebisinde, threatens to tear father and daughter apart. Its heart is the relationship between the father, Lanre (Femi Jacobs), and Mira(Susan Pwajok), as they deal with loss and a growth that reshapes them. The conditions of the shoot say as much about Azeez as the verdicts do. “I shot It Blooms in June while I was breastfeeding my baby, and I shot With Difficulty Comes Ease when I was pregnant,” she says.
Her process reflects the same attention to feeling over mechanics. Ideas arrive as scattered notes that can take years to connect. She then builds a log line, a detailed character sheet covering goals, desires and values, and sometimes runs her characters through personality tests. Only after the conventional structure is in place does she let her mind roam. Research follows, and she is always hunting for the human detail. “How did someone experience something? How did they feel about it? How did people around them feel about it?”
When asked what she cannot work without, she names two things: the first is a clear reason for the story to exist. “Why should this story exist? Who should see this?” Without it, she says she cannot give the project everything. “Everything I work on tends to have a piece of my soul in it.” The second is the right people: warm, hardworking, and sharing similar values. “This work is hard,” she said. She wants people who “have my back.”
Her last film, With Difficulty Comes Ease, put those principles to the test. Released on Prime Video on 1 August 2024, it is set against the conservative, deeply cultural backdrop of Northern Nigeria. It tells the story of Zainab, a young woman who becomes a widow shortly after conceiving her first child, following several miscarriages. During the Islamic mourning period for widows known as Iddah, she faces financial hardship, community judgment and pressure from her strict mother-in-law. Along the way she meets Rayyan, a fellow Igbo Muslim revert, a warm and empathetic bank officer who helps her rediscover her passion for fashion and her own strength. The film blends English and Hausa. It was executive produced by BB Sasore, the director of Breath of Life, and produced by Sheriff Akinola Bakare, with Fuchi Nwaturuocha among the co-producers.
According to Azeez, people assumed it would be “a Muslim Mount Zion film,” a purely faith-driven production. Her aim was the opposite: visibly Muslim characters in a Muslim home, in a film that cinephiles and Nollywood fans alike could enjoy, but just your everyday people with the characteristics and nuances that come with them. She also recalls an actor who declined the project, likely because the protagonist’s character, Zainab, played by Uzoamaka Power, was an Igbo Muslim convert. She wasn’t bothered. “Each to his own.” Her producing partner Fuchi Nwaturuocha, a Christian, has since worked with her again on her new film, and this time, it is branded as faith-based.
Daddy Bear is yet to be released and it isabout a widower raising two daughters. It follows With Difficulty Comes Ease, which centred on a widow, and It Blooms in June which also explores the loss of a loved one. I asked whether grief is a deliberate theme. She says it isn’t. “These are just the stories that find me.” What drew her to this one is the balance it demands. “Yes, your wife is dead, your whole world is ending, but you still have to make food for your children to eat.” It is also personal, since her husband is a girl dad.
The film also widens the picture of Muslim life in Nigeria. The family is Yoruba and Gbagyi, living in Abuja, which challenges the assumption that every Muslim is Hausa. It is exactly the sort of detail she means when she talks about showing the full range of a community, not a single type.
Telling these stories is only half the work. How they are told matters just as much. Too often, minority and neglected communities appear on screen as symbols rather than people, defined by a single trait, a single struggle, or a single lens. Nollywood has the chance to do better by giving these characters nuance, contradiction, humour, ambition, flaws and desires, the same full range of inner life that any other character is allowed. When audiences see this, they recognise that these communities are just like every other. There are many kinds of Muslims, northerners and members of underrepresented groups who fit neither the stereotypes outsiders hold nor the expectations their own communities sometimes place on them, and their stories deserve to be told too. A Muslim character can be a heartbroken romantic, a corrupt politician, a comedian, a dreamer, a villain or a hero, without carrying the burden of representing a whole faith in every scene. Faith can be part of who a character is without being the entire plot, and this is what Azeez continues to prove in her work. “In the end, we are all human.”
The film also highlights the role small businesses can play in supporting independent filmmaking. Made with a grant from Africa No Filter, Daddy Bear received in-kind sponsorships from several Nigerian brands after the team reached out for support. Abuja-based Chester Fries provided catering, Pink Fleur contributed clothing, and JayKay Delights supported the production with drinks. Other brands that came on board included Bliss Bambino, Muh Enterprises, Shirt Up and Shop, Sidi Apparels and Marzeis Beddings. Lagos-based brands, Papa Hand Made and Hingees helped with clothing and production design respectively. Their support shows how small businesses can contribute to bringing local stories to the screen, even when they cannot offer direct financial backing.
Next, she hopes, is the rom-com she has long wanted to make. There are projects in development she can’t discuss yet, but she is in no rush. “I’d rather take my time and do something that I’ll be proud of.”
As for being a rare voice in the industry, Korede Azeez is unfazed. “I’ve sort of been an outlier all my life,” she said. “If no one wants to make space for me, I’m going to make space for myself.”
