Living in Colors, and Lying To Yourself. The Censors Board Isn’t The Enemy

The Ambush Nobody Should Be Surprised By

Let’s stop pretending this is a surprise. Every filmmaker in Nigeria knows, or should know, what the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act says and what the NFVCB’s mandate is before they ever call “action” on set. The law has been on the books since 2014, signed under Goodluck Jonathan, and it doesn’t just criminalize same-sex marriage, it criminalizes same-sex relationships, public displays of affection, and anything read as “promoting” or “aiding” such unions. So when a film like Living in Colors gets built from the ground up around content the law explicitly forbids, and then gets ambushed at the finish line by the very body whose job is to enforce that law, that’s not censorship ambushing art. That’s a production team that either didn’t do its homework or did the homework and gambled anyway, hoping visibility would outrun regulation. It didn’t. It never was going to. Within a day of a poster and trailer surfacing, the NFVCB had already gone public confirming the film was never submitted, vetted, or classified, and confirmed it was coordinating with federal and state security to physically stop the premiere. That’s not an overreaction. That’s the predictable, on-record consequence of ignoring a regulator that has never once been quiet about where it stands.

Know the Terrain Before You Build On It

This is the part of the conversation Nigerian creatives keep skipping, and it’s the part I care about most as a commentator, filmmaking doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the space you choose to make your film in comes with rules whether you like them or not. You don’t build a restaurant on land zoned for something else and then act shocked when the authorities show up. The NFVCB’s mandate isn’t a mystery, it’s published, it’s been enforced consistently, and it has a paper trail stretching back years. When Ìfé premiered in 2020 as Nigeria’s first openly lesbian love story, the Board’s own executive director, Adebayo Thomas, told the BBC directly that Nigerian law makes no allowance for homosexual content in film, on stage, or in theatre, and that if the content is Nigerian and tells a Nigerian story, the Board claims jurisdiction over it regardless of where it’s hosted online. That statement alone should have been enough warning for every filmmaker who came after. And yet here we are again with All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White in 2024, whose own director, Babatunde Apalowo, said outright that he knew from the outset the film would never screen in a Nigerian cinema, he made his peace with that before he even shot a frame. A filmmaker who understands their industry studies the regulatory environment the same way they study casting, budget, and distribution. Skipping that step isn’t bravery. It’s a failure of basic industry literacy, and Nollywood doesn’t need more of that.

The Poster Wasn’t the Problem, The Premise Was

People keep framing this as “the Board banned a trailer before watching the film,” as though that’s some grave procedural sin. But the Board didn’t need to sit through ninety minutes to know what it was looking at, the subject matter itself is what’s prohibited, not the execution of it. Their own statement was explicit: preliminary review of the circulating trailer showed content depicting explicit material and actively promoting same-sex relationships, and on that basis alone the film was declared unlawful to exhibit or promote, classified or not. That’s not the Board being trigger-happy. That’s a regulator doing exactly what regulators exist to do: apply a standing law to content that plainly falls under it, the same way a customs officer doesn’t need to unpack an entire container to know a banned substance is inside once the manifest tells them what’s there. If the premise itself is illegal under the SSMPA, no amount of cinematography, performance, or festival polish changes that math. Filmmakers who go in believing craft can outrun the law are betting on a loophole that has never once existed in this country’s regulatory history, not for Ife, not for All the Colours, and certainly not now.

Representation Doesn’t Get a Free Pass From Regulation

I understand the instinct behind these films, the desire to tell stories that mainstream Nollywood has flattened into caricature. Pamela Adie, who produced Ife, has said plainly that she wanted to move past the industry’s standard portrayal of queer women as possessed, manipulated by bad influences, or in need of spiritual rescue by the third act, and instead show something closer to lived reality. That instinct isn’t the issue. But wanting representation doesn’t override the legal framework you’re operating inside, and treating “authentic storytelling” as some kind of override button on national law is where these projects keep losing the plot. Every industry has content restrictions somewhere, broadcast standards, obscenity law, defamation, incitement, and no serious filmmaker in any country gets to say “but this is my truth” and expect the regulator to fold on principle. Nigeria has been unusually consistent and unusually loud about where this particular line sits, backing it not with vague guidelines but with an actual criminal statute carrying penalties as severe as fourteen years imprisonment for the underlying conduct being depicted. Choosing to build a film, and a public premiere, squarely on the other side of that line isn’t an act of courage. It’s a choice to court exactly the outcome that followed, dressed up afterward as martyrdom.

The YouTube Loophole That Was Never Actually a Loophole

There’s a persistent misconception in Nollywood circles that the NFVCB’s authority stops at the cinema door or the Netflix upload button, and that anything destined for YouTube exists in some kind of regulatory gray zone. It doesn’t, and it never has. The Board’s mandate covers the classification and rating of all films intended for public exhibition in Nigeria, full stop, the platform is irrelevant to whether the law applies, only relevant to how enforcement gets carried out. This isn’t a new interpretation the Board is stretching to fit this moment; it’s the same position Adebayo Thomas laid out back in 2020 during the Ife saga, when he told the BBC plainly that as long as it’s Nigerian content telling a Nigerian story, the Board has a right to it regardless of where it’s hosted, and that films released online to dodge censorship would still be pulled down because of the NFVCB’s existing collaborations with Google, YouTube, and other major platforms. That threat wasn’t idle then, and it isn’t idle now, the same groundwork is reportedly being reinforced today, with the agency in ongoing talks with Google to ensure unclassified films uploaded to YouTube are identified and taken down at the platform level, not just chased after the fact through court filings. Filmmakers treating YouTube as an escape hatch from Nigerian film law are operating on a myth the Board has been publicly correcting for years. The venue was never the variable. The content was always the target.

If You Want to Change the Rules, Don’t Start By Breaking Them Publicly

Here’s what actually moves this conversation forward, and it’s not another ambushed premiere: if the SSMPA’s scope over film content is something the industry wants challenged, that fight belongs in courts, in policy advocacy, in the slow unglamorous work of legislative pressure, not in a Lagos cinema hoping the optics of a raid generate more sympathy than the film itself would have earned on its own merits. The Board has already shown it’s willing to go further than a polite rejection letter, threatening to seal venues, revoke operating licences, and pursue legal action against production companies, producers, and promoters alike under both the NFVCB Act and the SSMPA directly. Every filmmaker choosing this route is making a bet that public embarrassment for the NFVCB is worth more than a working relationship with the body that controls whether your film, this one or your next one, ever reaches an audience legally. That’s a short-term play with long-term costs, and it’s Nollywood’s aspiring provocateurs, not the Board, who keep absorbing them, film after film, premiere after cancelled premiere. Know the space. Know the guardrails. Then decide what story you’re actually equipped to tell inside it, because the terrain isn’t going to rearrange itself for anyone’s next project either.