S16 Film Festival 2025: Kagho Idhebor’s “My Jebba Story” and Lagos’ Architecture Space

Nigerian filmmaker and cinematographer, Kagho Idhebor has over the years fashioned a distinctive and recognisable filmmaking style and language. This style is discernible in his independently voiced, written, edited, shot and directed projects. The filmmaker, in these films, leans more towards documentary-esque shorts and photo essays produced from pictures he took on the street. This style has guided the production of Burkina Babes which was selected and included in the 2023/2024 sale catalogue of  The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and My Jebba Story, his most recent independent film that screened at the recently concluded S16 Film Festival and won the Audience Choice Award. Beyond The Mask, his African Magic Viewers Choice Award (AMVCA) winning short film, doesn’t smoothly fit into the two categories of these films due to how it strays outside the photo essay-esque ethos of the previous films. 

Idhebor started filming My Jebba Story about two decades ago when he arrived Lagos after graduating from film school, National Film Institute, Jos in the early 20s. A filmmaker friend had provided him with accommodation at his abode at Jebba Street in the bubbling low-income area of Ebute Metta. After some years on Jebba Street, Idhebor’s identity as a filmmaker was perceivable by community members. Thus, when he’s not taking their pictures, he’s organizing the community children and adults for makeshift film productions. These images, sourced from his personal archive, forms the basis for My Jebba Story which plays to an entrapped audience during its S16 Film Festival screening.

My Jebba Story chronicles Idhebor’s interaction with the street and people that accommodated him. In this way, the film shows Idhebor at his most formative, observational and conscious-of-his-environment self. As he waits for gigs and in-between them, the filmmaker takes pictures of his environment, documents and catalogue moments and builds bonds with children and adults of Jebba Street. The image of Jebba Street, a woman doting on her child, and another preparing her wares, men moving in mass numbers, children learning the rudiments of religion and spirituality and teenagers engaged in leisure activities are generously captured by Idhebor’s camera. 

These everyday images populate My Jebba Street. And Idhebor’s meditative, playful and serious voice gives the film its narrative coherence and structure. As the voice-over mentions, Idhebor’s camera has been warmly accepted by the neighbors after repeated encounters with it. Thus, the filmmaker’s neighbors don’t interpret the camera’s presence as a surveillance and invasive presence in their peacefully chaotic life. Rather, they meet and greet it with an air of familiarity reserved for acquaintances. The rough, spontaneous and vulnerable feel of the pictures justify this. And these vulnerable pictures and characters allow viewers to create mental narrative and stories around the people we see in the film.

The film also captures how different structures, buildings, and communities have been collapsed under the guise of renovation and rebuilding. For decades, numerous low-income and informal communities in Lagos State have faced demolitions and forced evictions, often as part of urban renewal, environmental management, and infrastructure projects. The forceful eviction of Makoko residents and the Oworonshoki demolition is a recent large-scale demolition backed by the Lagos State Government. These forceful eviction and demolition has provoked conversations and controversies over lack of notice, inadequate compensation and disregard for court orders. According to statistics, these demolitions and evictions have kicked more than 2.3 million working-class residents from their homes, while offering shoddy and foggy relocation plans and compensation.

This has a political undertone as The Agbajowo Collective’s The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos shows how Nigerian politicians encroach into low-income communities not for the purpose of development but destruction of their livelihood, space, and community. Ditto Tolu Ajayi’s Over The Bridge. In these films, we see how government expansionist plans aren’t sketched in the best interest of everyday vulnerable Nigerians who have been financially, socially, and economically disfranchised. But for luxury developments along the Lekki foreshore. These government-approved demolitions could be linked to the destruction of supposedly old structures and houses in Lagos by real estate developers. Daily, houses and structures are being demolished and stripped of their history only to build structures that don’t align with the geographical and communal feel of Lagos and Nigeria. These rapidly erected structures affect art, filmmaking, and spatial history. 

In a largely unregulated city where structures, unmindful of their historical or cultural importance, are being pulled down and rebuilt constantly, Nigerian filmmakers can’t easily film a street or house that’s representative of the 70s or 90s. Nigerian films and series can’t really carry the architectural and spatial essence of the Nigerian past. And, unfortunately, Nollywood doesn’t have the money to build structures and sound studios that can accommodate these historic films. Akinola Davies’ My Father’s Shadow is a timely example of how this modernity drives and pushes creative vision. Davies’ My Father Shadow is set during the 90s, and the film’s technical and creative team and department, from costume, props, and cinematography, tried to carry the spatial essence of that era. The film relies heavily on close-up shots of Lagos as a perfectly creative choice that allows the film to contain the staged 90s spatial aesthetics and not poison it with the touch of modernity that has engulfed Lagos’ architectural space. 

The existence of Idhebor’s film, which was shot about two decades ago bears witness to this ongoing historical ruin. The historical fabric, memory, and time markers that these structures and buildings hold are constantly being erased. 

To disentangle My Jebba Story from the above readings, Idhebor’s film is a meditative homage to Jebba Street, photography, the divinity of quotidian experiences and struggles, and dreaming and living. The film captures daily conversation and meaning and doesn’t forcefully push meaning or narrative into them. The director allows the images to tell individual and collective stories while Idhebor’s voice acts as a charismatic tour guide. The film is also reminiscent of the alluring tone in Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s Memories Of Love Returned and Tobias Wendl’s Future Remembrance, Photography and Image Arts in Ghana that explores the simple everyday importance of taking pictures and archiving moments, faces and places for the future.