Uyoyou Adia’s “Evi” to Tour Nigerian Universities

The producers of Uyoyou Adia’s Evi have announced their intention to organize a campus tour for the film. The tour is happening at an unspecified timeline and at schools across the country. This curated university screening will come after the film’s successful cinema run which started in March 2026.  

Evi is a 2026 Nigerian musical drama produced by Judith Audu and directed by Adia. The film stars Osas Okonyon as a talented but arrogant singer whose career collapses, it follows her journey of redemption and navigates the challenges of fame, genuine connection, and the Nigerian music industry. The producers will be announcing details of the tour in the coming weeks. This campus tour is a practical attempt to create an alternative model for the film distribution. 

In 2015, veteran filmmaker, Tunde Kelani toured Nigerian universities promoting Dazzling Mirage. The educational institutional tour went to tertiary institutions in Osun, Ogun, and Oyo state. In 2020, Kunle Afolayan’s Golden Effects Pictures and KAP Motion Pictures partnered with Ford Foundation to screen the Netflix Original, Citation, to the undergraduate students in Nigeria at KAP Hub.

For decades, Nigerian and African cinema has been bedeviled with multiple structural challenges, with distribution and piracy being two of the most recurring. Filmmakers have tried solving this with curated private and community screenings. There have, with Netflix and Prime Video’s tepid investment on the continent, been the launch of African-owned streaming platforms including KAVA, EbonyLife ON Plus, Circuits TV, and others. These platforms which run different business models are practical attempts at distributing Nigerian films to Nigeria and Africans in the diaspora. 

The Pan-African Screen Connect is also trying to connect African filmmakers and films with audiences across the continent. Kolawole Adewoye’s Fusion Intelligence has attempted to transform Nigerian cinema by launching FilmHub, an initiative focused on building secure, low-cost urban community cinemas. The project uses Convoy, a proprietary technology for secure content transfer and reach for digital ticketing, allowing local venues to screen films while preventing piracy. Although the platform’s experimentation with Akay Mason’s Red Circle failed, there have been community cinema initiatives with the most recent being that of Femi Adebayo’s Ageshinkole: King of Thieves. These initiatives, including the underexplored and underexploited university tours, can be interpreted as individual and collective attempts at solving Nollywood’s distribution and accessibility issues. 

In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Kelani described the university’s tour as an attempt to bring films closer to consumers while fighting piracy. “Distributing films or other content physically is becoming increasingly difficult, revenues are lost on a daily basis and content owners are at the mercy of the menacing activities of pirates. I think it is just natural, expedient and sensible to take contents closer to the consumers on demand and in terms that suit all the parties involved,” he said.

For Evi and other Nigerian filmmakers, the campus tours target a specific Nigerian demographic primed for local films. It also helps to build  loyal fanbases and allows filmmakers to gather real-time feedback from an obsessed, critical and vocal audience. 

A campus tour operating as a supplementary distribution channel after the theatrical window models a hybrid strategy that is still underutilized in Nollywood. A complimentary cinema tour demonstrates that theatrical and community screening can coexist, which has implications for how future mid-budget films and filmmakers can think about their film releases.