(The Agbajowo Collective, 2024, Nigeria & The United States, 100 min, in English)

Jawu lives in one of the floating slums pushed into the lagoon which gives the megacity Lagos its name – a young mother scraping by in an indifferent city. However, the spirit of the great warrior king Egbaezen has marked her for a terrible responsibility and ordeal. Danger now threatens his people, as corrupt officials conspire to evict thousands from their ancestral homes. Egbaezen’s spirit takes the form of an African Grey parrot, and sets in motion a chain of events that will change Jawu and her entire community forever.

A NOTE FROM THE COLLECTIVE

Our story emerged from the ashes of the forced eviction of Otodo Gbame in 2017 – a Lagos waterfront community of 30,000 swept into the lagoon, its residents left homeless, its homes demolished. Over the years that have followed, the debris has been covered over with sand dredged up from the sea floor. Another name on a long list of communities lost – consumed by the concrete in Africa’s largest city.

We came together to tell this story because it had to be told. Because right now – today, and yesterday, and every day since 2017 – Otodo Gbame residents remain displaced, as with tens of thousands more from other communities across Lagos. Many more remain under the threat of forced eviction in Lagos, and in ever-growing megacities across the world.

We are a director’s collective of young storytellers from informal settlements across Lagos, and film professionals who lived in Lagos for the years of the film’s story development and production. Beyond this group stand the many who made this film possible – through offering their stories, their guidance, their energy, and wisdom – giving our film a collective ethos that runs much deeper than a small group of directors.

In our finale, a line of community women link arms to stand against a band of policemen, hired thugs, and contracted machinery to protect the only place they’d ever called home. We shot that scene in four 10-minute takes, and our human-shield needed no direction. Our actors had been there before – in April 2017 – the same group of women, linking arms to defend Otodo Gbame in the real-life showdown on which the scene was based.

Our film is an outpouring. A hymn. A battle cry. A hope, that a story can make a change. A song, from a community, still waiting.