The frame travels
Lagos is writing for a screen that no longer sits still in one country. What happens to a film when its first audience is somewhere else entirely?
A film made in Surulere now opens, in practice, in four places at once: a cinema on the Island, a living room in Peckham, a phone on a bus in Nairobi, and a comment thread that has already decided what it thinks. None of those rooms watch the same way. All of them are the release.
For most of the last decade the industry treated this as a distribution problem — a matter of getting the file to more places. It is a writing problem. When the diaspora is not the secondary market but part of the first weekend, the script is being read by people who carry a different set of references into the dark.
The temptation is to flatten. Explain a little more. Subtitle the Yoruba. Cut the joke that only lands in Lagos. Every one of those decisions is small, and together they produce a film that belongs to nowhere in particular.
What travels is specificity
The films that have crossed furthest in the last three years did the opposite. They got more local, not less. They trusted that an audience will follow a world it does not know if the world is confident about itself.
That is not a moral position. It is a commercial one. Specificity is the only thing that does not translate into competition.
We stopped asking whether London would get it. London gets it or London does not. The film still has to be true in Lagos.
A producer, speaking on background