Sundance 2026: Olive Nwosu’s “Lady” is Calling for a Revolution

One of what Olive Nwosu’s Lady gets right is this: Nigeria is overripe for a revolution. In Nwosu’s directorial feature debut, the eponymous character (played by Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah) carries a quiet, heavy burden that mirrors the national mood. This mixture of resilience and silence will, through the course of the film, be stretched thin. The film suggests that personal peace, safety, and comfort are unachievable courtesy of decades of political failure. And, in a country where basic survival becomes a daily feat of strength, dissident and revolutionary-inclined demands are imminent. In a creative ecosystem where Nigerian arts (from film to music) have been disentangled from raising intellectual and political consciousness, Lady exists as a reminder of the place of art in motivating political and intellectual discourse. 

The eponymous-titled Lady is Nwosu’s directorial debut feature, which had its premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival as one of the three African feature-length films that screened at the festival. The film was developed at the Sundance lab and screened in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition before a slot in Berlin’s Panorama section. 

The film is set against the backdrop of a fuel-starved, inflation-hit Lagos. The film explores the political and economic uncertainties that have besieged the city and country while navigating the quotidian realities of Lady, a fiercely independent, androgynous-presenting cab driver. The film explores the intersection of personal trauma and national upheaval through the eyes of Lady, who has spent her life trying to remain invisible while navigating a man’s world. Lady has a single goal: earn enough to escape to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Unperturbed about social and national conversations, she leads a peaceful, solitary life. Her interaction with Iya, one of her neighbors at the riverine Makoko, is the few interactions she shares. She doesn’t initiate or engage in leisure and social activities. Lady keeps her fellow cab drivers at arm’s length. But all these will gradually fade when Pinky (Amanda Oruh), her childhood best friend, returns after a five-year disappearance. Now working as a sex worker, Pinky will pull Lady out of her self-imposed isolation and into the vibrant and dangerous sisterhood and Lagos’ night life. 

As Lady drives Pinky, Sugar (Tinuade Jemiseye), and other sex workers around Lagos, DJ Revolution (Seun Kuti), a radio host whose voice permeates the film, nudges Nigerians towards their political responsibility of rescuing the country from capitalist politicians. While Lady tunes him out to focus on survival, his rhetoric will eventually propel her internal awakening and resistance. 

Cinema is a custodian and archive of realities. Nigerian films, willingly and unwillingly, capture Nigerian interaction with politics. From Old to New Nollywood, we have seen Nigerian films and filmmakers engaging with social and political issues. Films like Isakaba, Saworoide, Owo Blow, Eyimofe, The Herd and others like it carry the weight of Nigerian consciousness. They present Nigerian characters dealing with the complexities of governmental failures and deceits.

In Nwosu’s Lady, the lead character isn’t keen about whatever political discontent DJ Revolution keeps stirring, but she constantly listens to his channel. It’s symbolic of how resistance against capitalist and corrupt leadership lies dormant in the unconsciousness of the Nigerian masses. On the radio, DJ Revolution urges the populace to protest, but Lady just wants to relocate to Freetown in Sierra Leone, her mother’s birthplace and, for Lady, a place that symbolises liberation and independence.

In today’s Nigerian political and economic discourse, the call for revolution is gradually dissipating into another political buzzword, detached from its meaning. When we demand revolution, what does that mean? When Nigerian human rights activist, Omoyele Sowore, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), Trade Union Congress (TUC), left organisations including Movement for Socialist Alternative (MSA), Joint Action Front (JAF), Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), and the Nigerian workers’ demand for social and political change and revolution, what do they practically mean? A systemic transition from a capitalist-led political system to a socialist one or a move towards just a change in political parties? These are urgent questions that DJ Revolution and the film don’t accurately provide answers to. DJ Revolution calls for a protest, but what are the practical demands? Perhaps the film is solely interested in rousing viewers’ political consciousness, which in turn motivates independent thinking about what freedom and economic prosperity mean to them. 

Lady is the archetypal Lagosian and Nigerian. She’s conscious of how governmental policies and activities affect her livelihood, diminish her humanity, and reduce her chance of freedom, but rather than fight the system, she’s concerned about living and finding ways to bypass the system designed to hunt her down. Thus, while she declines joining her fellow drivers in protesting, she willingly queues at the filling station and moves through Lagos with no customers in sight. Conversely, Lady embodies a harsh truth Nigerians reluctantly accept: you may not be interested in Nigerian politics and economics, but they are definitely interested in you.”

Another aspect of the film is its exploration of sex work and sex workers’ children, thinking about their parents’ job. Lady’s mother is a sex worker, and her encounter with a sexual activity involving her mother and a nameless man explains her aversion towards sex. In Ifeoma Nkiruka Chukwuogo’s Bariga Sugar, we see the children of sex workers being socially ostracized.  In Nwamaka Chikezie’s My Mama Na Ashawo, we see the child of a sex worker embracing the stigmatized identity of her sex-worker mother and a liberal rhetoric around sex work. Nwosu argued that sex work is indicative of systemic rut and government disinterest in performing their social responsibilities. 

How much political conversation and change these films can make is another important question. Nigerian films, thanks to inflation and economic hardship, have been priced out of the reach of the average Nigerian audience. Nigerians will prioritize food before thinking of visiting Nigerian cinemas or subscribing to streaming platforms. A large number of indigent Nigerians for whom this film is made have been structurally and economically ostracized from engaging with the film. This is a challenge that has been structurally placed on the table of Nigerian filmmakers. Thus, in such a context, what can the class-and-politics-conscious filmmaker do? 

Another political importance of Nwosu’s Lady is its ability to provide a class analysis on the demolition of Makoko and other working-class environments where the film is staged. Although the film doesn’t capture how different structures, buildings, and communities have collapsed under the guise of renovation and rebuilding touted by the Lagos state, it offers valuable insights. In a scene, Sugar painfully mentions how the government frames working-class citizens as a “stain on the nation’s identity,” defiling their megacity. The ongoing demolition in Makoko and other informal communities proves one point: the Lagos megacity is built on the bones and blood of working-class Nigerians.

There’s something about the interior life of Lady that gets skirted around. Save for her trauma, interest in Freetown and apathy, we barely know who she is. Who is Lady? This simplistic question is important in knowing who she is. There’s deposit in Lady that anxiety of wanting to leave and stay. She feels stuck yet progressing. It’s the usual paradox that Nigerians are aware of. There’s that deep interest to escape the surrounding ruins and patriotic urge to stay and fix the country. These are more important interior conversations and character markers that this film doesn’t fully commit to. 

In Culture Custodian’s review of Afolabi Olalekan’s Freedom Way, I had argued that Nigerian filmmakers aren’t activists obligated with filling their films with protest-driven rhetoric and jargons, But, when films venture into political and social commentary, it is important to analyze their political intent and new insights, ideas, and thinking the filmmaker is offering in addressing the issue at hand. Lady has this in abundance. 

In one of the film’s closing moments, Lady reluctantly joins a group of protesters. This scene is a testament to the unignorable Nigerian ecosystem — a force pulls you into its political and economic orbit even against your will. The moment underscores the futility of individual subversion and demonstrates that personal maneuvering within the system cannot yield structural reform. True political change, the type Lady and the Nigerian masses need, requires the concerted power of collective resistance and organized dissent. Effective political transformation relies not on individual cunning, but on mass mobilization and public protest. This film articulated this powerful message.