Beyond the Applause: Why We Are Putting Nollywood's Hardest Conversations in One Room - NIFS 2026
On Tuesday, August 25, at Glover Memorial Hall on Lagos Island, the Nigerian International Film Summit will convene the NIFS 2026 Critics' Roundtable & Industry Think Tank. For one hour thirty minutes, some of the most consequential voices in Nigerian cinema, critics, an exhibitor, a distributor, and the Director-General of the National Film and Video Censors Board, will sit at one table and have the conversations this industry has been having everywhere except in a room where they count.
The Conversation Nollywood Keeps Postponing
Here is the uncomfortable truth this Roundtable is built on: Nollywood's most important debates do not happen in Nollywood. They happen on Twitter, in fragments, at 11pm, between people who will never share a stage. Storytelling quality is debated in quote tweets. Distribution is debated in subtweets. Criticism itself is debated mostly as a question of who insulted whom. The industry celebrates loudly and thinks quietly, if at all, and an industry that only converses in fragments will only reform in fragments.
Beyond the Applause exists to end that arrangement for one afternoon. The premise is simple and slightly dangerous: put the arguments in a credible room, in front of the people who can actually act on them, and refuse to let the session end as vibes. Every segment closes with concrete recommendations, and the whole conversation converts into a formal output, the NIFS 2026 Communiqué on the State of Nollywood, followed by a White Paper directed at the Federal Ministry, state governments, guilds, film schools, distributors, exhibitors and platforms. We are not gathering to talk. We are gathering to put things on paper that institutions will have to respond to.
Why a Room, and Why Now
Timing is everything, and the timing here is deliberate. Nigerian cinema is living a paradox: record-breaking domestic box office concentrated in few hands and fewer screens; international streamers retreating from Nigerian commissioning even as new international co-production capital bets on Nigerian infrastructure; a YouTube-first Nollywood rising fast enough to redraw the industry's map while the industry pretends not to notice. We are simultaneously celebrating and structurally fragile, which is precisely why the session is titled Beyond the Applause. The applause is real. So is everything underneath it.
The Critics' Table: Where the Conversation Starts
The session opens with thirty minutes that some will find provocative by design: the critics go first. This is a deliberate reversal of Nollywood's usual seating arrangement, where criticism is treated as noise the industry tolerates rather than infrastructure the industry needs. The core panel holds the table for the full two hours: Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, Irabor Okosun, and Dami Dawson, with AA Presley moderating. Between these film critics, sit years of published criticism, industry analysis, and, let us be honest, a few scars from an industry that often responds to critique with silence or hostility.
Why do these voices matter? Because a film culture without functioning criticism is a market without price discovery. The critics' segment will interrogate storytelling quality, the ethics of criticism itself, and the strange silence that greets honest reviews in an industry that claims to want growth. Critics who publish under their own names, defend their arguments in public, and return the following week are performing a service the industry has never properly priced. On August 25, that service takes the first seat, not the last.
The Exhibitor's Seat: Mrs Funmi Onuma, Silverbird Cinemas
Twenty minutes belong to the person who controls the door. Mrs Funmi Onuma joins the table from Silverbird Cinemas, one of the defining names in Nigerian exhibition, to answer the questions every filmmaker asks in private and almost never to an exhibitor's face. Why does a country of over two hundred million people have so few screens? How are films actually selected, scheduled and retained? What happens to the ambitious mid-budget film in a showtime economy built around event releases? Nigeria's box office records are being set inside an exhibition bottleneck, and there is no honest conversation about Nollywood's next decade that does not pass through the cinema door. Mrs Onuma's seat matters because she can speak from inside the machine, not about what exhibition should ideally be, but about what it actually is, what it costs to run, and what it would take to grow it.
The Distributor's Seat: The Business Between the Film and the Audience
Blessing Ogbe joins the table for the distributor's segment, addressing the least glamorous and most decisive layer of the value chain, the deals, percentages, P&A realities and release calculus that determine which films live and which quietly disappear. Distribution is where Nollywood's power actually sits, and it is the layer the public understands least, partly because it prefers not to be understood. Twenty minutes of a distributor answering direct questions, on the record, is worth a year of speculation threads.
The Policy Seat: Dr. Shaibu Husseini and the Question of the State
The entire session builds toward its final guest. Dr. Shaibu Husseini, Director-General of the National Film and Video Censors Board, joins for the Policy Seat, the direct line to government. By the time he sits, the room will have spent 60 minutes diagnosing storytelling, criticism, exhibition and distribution; his segment is where diagnosis meets the question of what the state can actually do. On the table: the classification-versus-censorship balance and what filmmakers should expect the Board to be by 2030, gatekeeper, referee, or enabler; whether the NFVCB can anchor the national film data infrastructure this industry embarrassingly still lacks; what is genuinely within government's power on piracy; why intervention funding historically fails to reach emerging filmmakers; and the decade question, what government must build for Nollywood to compete globally, and what it must resist the temptation to control.
And then the session's most important ask, which will be stated here in advance so no one is ambushed: will the NFVCB formally receive the NIFS 2026 Communiqué and champion its recommendations within the Federal Ministry and across government? The room will remember that answer more than any other.
Bruised Egos, Better Industry
Let me be direct about the tone, because it is the point. We may bruise some egos on August 25. That is acceptable. What is not acceptable is another year of an industry applauding itself past its own structural failures. The rules of engagement are published and firm: honest, not hostile; critique systems, patterns and works, not personalities; specifics over vibes, every strong claim arrives with an example, a number, or a named mechanism; and every segment ends at solutions. 'Nollywood stories are getting worse' is a tweet. 'Here is what our development process skips and what it costs us' is a contribution. We are assembling a room for contributions.
From Talk to Paper
The measure of August 25 will not be how it trended. It will be the Communiqué and the White Paper that leave the room, documents with named recommendations, directed at named institutions, that can be tracked, cited and, where necessary, thrown back at all of us at NIFS 2027. Nollywood does not lack talent, ambition or audience. It lacks the habit of honest institutional conversation. On Tuesday, August 25, at Glover Memorial Hall, we begin building that habit, beyond the applause.
The Nigeria International Film Summit (NIFS) is a premier industry platform founded by Ijeoma Onah, a film and creative-industry strategist passionate about strengthening Nigeria's film ecosystem. NIFS brings together filmmakers, producers, investors, distributors, exhibitors, and policymakers to discuss the future of Nigerian cinema, foster collaborations and conect Nollywood with global opportunities.
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