The power to tell one's own story.
Award-winning film and series, through Seun Dania Production Company — narrative as its own form of nation-building, and culture as a claim to sovereignty.
A people who tell their own story shape their own future.
Cultural sovereignty is the right to be author rather than subject — to hold the frame through which a nation sees itself, and through which the world sees it. Where that authorship is borrowed, a people appears in stories it did not write. Where it is owned, it decides its own image.
Film and series are not decoration on the edge of the work. They are nation-building in another material — the medium in which a society argues with itself, remembers, and imagines what it might become.
Seun Dania Production Company.
The company's debut feature, Nimbe (2019), confronts Nigeria's drug epidemic through the story of a boy failed by those around him. It won Best Nollywood Drama and Best Nollywood Actress at the Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival, screened at the UK Nollywood Film Festival and the Lake International Pan-African Film Festival in Kenya, and became one of the year's box-office successes — African stories carried to the world on their own terms.