Thousands of Burkina Faso residents and international festivalgoers packed the Palais des Sports complex in the Ouaga 2000 district for opening ceremonies of the African continent’s largest and oldest film festival, Fespaco. This year marked the festival and television market’s return to its standard timeframe post-COVID-19 pandemic, during late February into the first week of March 2023.

Since 2015 Burkina Faso has been battling insurgencies by jihadist groups in the north and eastern regions. Within the last year it has endured two coups, making this year’s festival a special time for hosting. Security was tight in and around the venue, with the army positioned strategically across Ouagadougou.

“In the face of the unprecedented security crisis, we remain standing,” said Burkinabé’s former Fespaco Film Archivist, Patrice Napon.

Fifteen films were in competition for the top prize, the Yennenga Golden Stallion. In total, 70 cinema, television films, and series were selected by Fespaco’s general delegate, Alex Moussa Sawadogo, for this year’s eleven categories.
Top winner Fespaco 2023 edition:
First Place Tennenga Gold Stallion: Ashkal – by Youssef Chebbi (Tunisia)
Second Place prize: Sira?- by?Apolline Traoré?(Burkina Faso)
Third Place Prize:?Shimoni?- by Angela Wamai (Kenya)

This year, the bi-annual showcased the first Filmmaker Accelerator Program, a Product-Based- Learning Initiative designed for Burkina Faso cinema students interested in film and new media career paths. The project is organized by Plan B Agency based in the USA and its alliance partner ARDN Red Card, in collaboration with FESPACO, Gcom productions, and educational partners, ISIS – High Institute of Technological Information and Communications, and the Swiss UNEF University of Burkina. “We are excited and proud about this progressive educational project and working with Plan B Agency as they engage cinema students from West Africa to create these video campaigns to expand our message,” said Richard Tiene, producer/director and owner of Gcom productions, Burkina Faso.

That tension is in nearly every scene of Moumouni Sanou’s Night Nursery, which won the Best Documentary award at FESPACO this year. The nursery in the title refers to a house in Burkina Faso where children are left to be cared for because their mothers work mostly by night. Where are the fathers? Who knows. But knowing that these mothers are hookers might provide an answer to that question.

The premise of the documentary might suggest there’s something entrepreneurial about the old lady running the nursery. She is, after all, meeting a demand with her service. But whatever business acumen led to the establishment of the nursery isn’t really the focus of this documentary. Its interest is more the fly on the wall sort. The camera is there but not quite there. Only in one scene towards the end is the man behind the camera referred to. This passivity and apparent impartiality of Sanou’s lens allows the story, where there is one, to be conveyed by the activity and words of the subjects, which is quite good, given that nobody speaks for them. But it also means that structured storytelling isn’t quite attained, so that the documentary is a general exploration of the living conditions of the women and their relationship with the nursery that houses their children for many hours before dawn.

Naturally, there are tricky relationships. Or one tricky relationship, which helps the documentary to have some conflict. This conflict comes in the shape of a mother who leaves her child for over a year and then returns to face the angry caretaker. After an attempt to deny she’s been away so long, she concedes that she has behaved badly, but says she had gotten into trouble and insists she never forgot her child. “Why would I come back?” she asks as a retort to those who have accused her of absconding after dropping off her offspring. The child, a chubby-cheeked little girl, stays oblivious, eating a snack. To consider her future is to invite tragic thoughts.

Sanou clearly believes in showing his subjects’ warts and all, which is perhaps an admirable trait for a documentary maker. But it is not quite possible to watch Night Nursery and praise all that one sees, all that it shows. Sanou’s impartiality gives glimpses of dignity in certain moments that are obviously borne of poverty, as in one scene where a child is getting bathed in a metal basin. Something about the mother cleaning her child is endearing, and clearly not an activity restricted to one half of the class line. That tenderness, that palpable humanity, unfortunately doesn’t come through in every scene. Viewers of a certain sensibility will cringe at how breastfeeding is shown in a couple of scenes. In one, a mother pacifies her crying child as it sleeps on the floor of her apartment. It is an intimate moment between mother and child and it is being done in the informality of her home. Did it have to be shown in what looks like the most undignified manner possible? No. Does agreeing to be in a documentary while poor imply the forfeiture of one’s dignity? It shouldn’t.

The feeling of second-hand shame reaches its apogee, when, in the closing shot, two exhausted women cradling their babies are shown fast asleep, crumpled in the backseat of a car. The camera stays on their bodies as one baby suckles and then, much too active, leaves the mother’s breast exposed. Is this a scene that would exist if the mother was on the other side of the class line? It seems unlikely. And leaving that as the documentary’s parting shot, thus calling attention to it, recalls a popular Janet Malcolm remark about journalists: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Sanou is a director, not a journalist, but the line is apt, even if he is neither stupid nor, as far as I can tell, full of himself. One just wishes that his need to tell a true story with a superfluous level of detail didn’t overwhelm his sense of discretion at crucial moments.

Director: Moumouni Sanou
Cinematography: Pierre Laval
Editing: François Sculier
Sound Design: Ivan Broussegotte
Sound: Corneille Houssou
Producer: Berni Goldblat
Production: VraiVrai Films (France), Blinker Filmproduktion (Germany)
Duration: 67 minutes

Fortunately, through an interpreter, the director gets what he wants across. A few things have bothered him about his family’s history, which he has been working on—presumably to produce a documentary like the one we are seeing. Akinleminu has come to ask the oracle if it can explain to him why his father hid a secret from his mother, and why his mother never asked for an explanation. About what? Well, we are not told explicitly at first. But as Baba begins consulting the goddess Olokun the story unspools, starting from a letter written in 1975. This letter is from the director’s European mother, giving an account of her time with her Nigerian husband.

The framing of the first few moments of When A Farm Goes Aflame suggests there is something to be unraveled both for the director, who is clearly on a quest, and for the viewer. This narrative gap is soon bridged, however, and it doesn’t take too long to understand that the story is a personal one, one in which the director seeks to understand the breakup of his family. Thus, When A Farm Goes Aflame is an autobiography told through other people. Chiefly it’s told through the wonderful, if a tad melancholy, letters the director’s mother wrote over the years of her marriage and in some other ways. In one memorable scene, Akinleminu’s mother and a group of women sit around, laughing and having a meal. One lady explains how African men had come to Europe and met their wives, but couldn’t find jobs. Unable to earn a living, many went back to their home countries and “then things happen”. These many years later, those things that happened are still “things that can be painful for Danish women.”

It’s an important distinction she makes for Danish women, as it admits that it may not necessarily be so for women from other cultures, given that not every tradition thinks of polygamy in the same way. Even among the women speaking in that apartment in Denmark, there are some differences in thinking.

Asked about her partner’s polygamy, one lady, who remained with her polygamous husband, says it was never hidden from her. Nonetheless, “there were a few camels to swallow along the road,” she says, adding that she was probably in denial and then she adds the kicker: that is what you do when you are young and hopeful. It’s a remarkable framing of love and romance across cultures, even when she admits that she was close to leaving on a number of occasions. But then she and her husband “talked about things and worked it out.”

Including her perspective in a documentary could easily have been edited into a stick to beat people who have a different view, but here it broadens the film’s appeal and provides another angle to view the mystery of intimacy between lovers. Yet even the idea of talking things over is complicated when Akinleminu’s mother says it’s possible to be so understanding that “you kill a part of yourself.”

The cultural differences extend to the existence of this documentary. While the European part of the family is willing to talk, the Nigerian part—the father and a half-brother—urge the director to forget about the past. If it was up to them, there would be no film.

Despite its primary concern with the director’s family, this is a political project. When a document mentions hardship in 1991, economic historians will understand that as a reference to the IMF and World Bank-supported Structural Adjustment Program, a policy that pretty much decimated the Nigerian middle class. But there is a significant level of warmth overall, which has to be an achievement given that, hovering over the material, alongside the pain felt by members of Akinleminu’s family, is the eternally contentious matter of international migration—be it for work, for school, or for that most perplexing of reasons, love.

Director, screenwriter, cinematographer: Jide Tom Akinleminu
Producers: Florian Schewe, Yan Schoenefeld
Editing: Maja Tennstedt with Naaman Bishara
Production company; Film Five (Germany)
World Sales: Syndicado Film Sales (Toronto)
In Danish, Yoruba, English
Duration: 112 minutes

The most welcome thing first. It was a pleasure to see director Mati Diop speaking on the Cine Burkina stage before her film, and her appearance prefigured closing night where another woman stood on the awards stage, clutching the festival’s big prize, the Etalon de Yennega, clearly overwhelmed with emotion. Although she was accepting the award for the Gravedigger’s Wife on behalf of its male, first-time feature director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, who was absent, the fact that the big night ended with a woman’s moment of victory onstage was apt for a continent where women own some of the most recognizable faces both in front of and behind the camera. The frustrating thing was that Atlantique was screened without English subtitles. It seemed like it might have been an oversight, until it became clear that it wasn’t. More on this later.

Outside of the screening halls, FESPACO was a bit of a shambles. Although it was launched back in 1969, it still hasn’t figured out basic things in 2021, which is quite unflattering for such an important event. The biggest failure this year was one that has occurred in the past: filmmakers getting brought to the festival after their films have already been screened. Blunders of this sort have gone under-reported over the years, perhaps because the film industry’s global elite are happy to be in a small African country where the film festival is nearly sacred, so central is it to its citizens’ existence. Or maybe they don’t care too much once the awards have been distributed. It can be quite a strange thing to observe incensed festival goers complaining loudly on a daily basis and then, at the festival’s close, expressing nothing but joy.

But even so, the most joy is reserved for French speakers. It can be incredibly frustrating for anyone who doesn’t speak the language to see films, since the program brochure doesn’t indicate which films have English subtitles. Viewers must take a seat in the cinema, praying that the film to be shown will have understandable subtitles, while they miss simultaneous screenings.  Of course, it’s understandable that Burkina Faso is a French speaking country, but the disregard for a language like English at an international festival today is quite ridiculous.

This, of course, has implications for both the festival and its filmmakers. FESPACO’s international positioning as the most important film festival in Africa can be contested (a sign at Burkina Faso’s international airport boasts it is the capital of African film, no doubt because of FESPACO). English, many will argue, is the language of international cinematic success, and by doing too little to help filmmakers get noticed by media in that language, FESPACO is underserving those making their debut there. Programmers from outside of Africa also show up, hoping to snap up films-in-progress for world premieres at their own festivals. The big hitters don’t have a problem, as many of them have already shown their work in the global north before arriving at Ouagadougou.  But the filmmakers who don’t get courted by those big festivals have only FESPACO for coverage.

And later, after the festival’s awards were announced and the big winners received another screening, the situation remained unchanged. One reason for this, as some in film circles say, is that FESPACO is a French (language) festival and a French (nationality) entity, so that, as long as some support is gotten from its former colonial administrator France, it will remain as it is, even if the battle being fought with English is an illusory one, having been won a long time ago and being now blatantly confirmed by English internet content. If this theory is fact, one needs only look at the Cannes Film Festival to note that different standards apply. How much French does Spike Lee, president of the 2021 Cannes jury, speak?

To be honest, in terms of plans that didn’t quite materialize, there are signs that FESPACO is heading for more inclusiveness between Anglophone and Francophone Africa—but that might depend on whether the festival’s current leader, Moussa Sawadogo, retains his position next year. That’s a decision that will be arrived at after some high-level politics far removed from the halls of Cine Burkina or Cine Neerwaya.

The area which has always been FESPACO’s biggest draw is its films, and this year was another giant feast of African cinematic goodies. There just isn’t another venue within the continent (and maybe even outside of it) with the mix FESPACO has to offer. The big, the small, the deep, the bizarre, the comic, the heavily political—FESPACO gives its audience everything and then some. The one note of concern is that several films were about the usual African suspects seen in the Western media: poverty, violence, trauma. One worries that African filmmakers, after years of getting certain images foisted on them, are now producing those images themselves. It’s a poor continent but surely there is some joy to be found here and there. Nonetheless, this rather miserable matrix has produced some quite wonderful films in the past. It may do so in the future, even if a larger bucket of themes is to be hoped for.

Admittedly, it is not quite clear what the future might hold for African cinema, given its many different countries and sensibilities. But a somewhat ideal (and in one case, idyllic) picture of the future was presented at FESPACO this year, as two films, Eyimofe and This Is Not a Burial, It Is a Resurrection, suggested two paths forward for quality African filmmaking. One: a small film well-made. The other: an expansive vision well executed.

The first, by Nigerian twin brothers Chuko and Arie Esiri, follows two characters who are inconsequential in the society they live in, but it gives their dreams of a better future an extraordinary amount of care—even when things don’t quite work out as planned. The other, by Lesotho auteur Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, is a poetic, ambitious yarn about one elderly woman’s defiance in a society that seeks to erase her pastoral heritage because of a move towards modernity. In essence, one film has young characters dreaming of departure; the other has an old character resolutely standing firm. Both films are in an oblique conversation about development, population, and immigration, which suggests they are politically charged. But it is to the filmmakers’ credit that the heavy political content doesn’t overwhelm the narrative. Both films are enjoyable and of such high quality that they ought to become required viewing for ambitious filmmakers looking to cover African grounds with their lenses.

Unfortunately, both films were shut out of FESPACO’s biggest awards, even if This Is Not a Burial won the cinematography award. Of course, that was a judgment made by Abderrahmane Sissako’s jury. But you can bet your house that posterity will make a different decision.

The handsy session culminates in what the man perceives as disrespect from the object of his lust. And not long after we see the bar owner upbraiding her employee about her misbehavior: so what if she has to play whore? Not quite willing to hear the waitress’s objections, the owner fires her.

In essence, within the first few scenes, Nameless has offered a look at how money, class, and sexism work in Rwandan business and maybe in business everywhere. And yet, it doesn’t feel like it’s the end of the world for Kathy, the now unemployed waitress, who later comes across Philbert, one of her former customers, on the street. Shot with what appears to a handheld device that occasions a less-than-sleek shake within a scene, the episode on the street is watchable mostly on the strength of its performers, both of whom have the same unvarnished capacity that Nameless itself has. There is nothing super-flirtatious about their exchange, but the proximity of their bodies as they talk about matters unrelated to romance suggests more than the content of their lines.

At this stage, Nameless appears to be the type of film that seeks to present the svelte humanity that is possible even within personal and interpersonal lack. Philbert lives in a cramped apartment and the first time Kathy comes to visit, he asks a neighborhood boy to buy him something from a store nearby. He tells his visitor that he has been unemployed since he graduated years ago. She tells him about her family and starts to cry. The shots have strange angles, given the cramped nature of the room they’re in, and it’s a small wonder how the film was shot. When this pair starts a family, the physical set-up of the room is going to have repercussions.

There are any number of films that represent the end of the affair or its teething problems. Not long ago, memes and short videos were made from the Adam Driver-Scarlett Johansson argument in A Marriage Story. There is one to rival that scene in Nameless. It starts small and then escalates into a full-blown war, where each party attempts to outdo the other in insults. In A Marriage Story, there is a lot to look to at aesthetically. In Nameless, the entire thing is so harsh, you want to escape the hurt and the squalor of these two people who maybe should not have started a family or even a relationship in the midst of such material poverty. But how do you legislate the emotional yearning of two consensual adults? There is an argument to be made for how the brutality of the world can perhaps be made easier if the impoverished are able to create a romantic bubble—but, as Nameless seems to say, at a certain level of lack, every bubble made by the poor would burst.

For Philbert, his manhood and his youthful dreams are at stake. He has met a former schoolmate who has started to make it big in the film business, even travelling to Paris to meet his boss. The filmmaker is played by his real life equivalent and is a bit self-serving, but that’s no real crime in this small picture that should be seen by more people—but would need some technical overhaul to win over more viewers outside of the festival circuit.

Director, screenplay: Mutiganda Wa Nkunda
Cast: Yves Kijyana, Colombe Mukeshimana
Producer: Yuhi Amuli, Tanit Films, Izacu Am Theater
Editing: Orange Studio
Casting: Yves Kijyana, Colombe Mukeshimana
Distribution: Orange Studio
International sales: Orange Studio
Runtime: 85 minutes

It soon becomes apparent that Friday is seeking to cross the desert into Morocco where it is his dream to join the circus. The old man has a different plan. He tells Friday he is on his way to his daughter’s wedding and is carrying a gift to her. It is, however, clear to both the viewer and the boy that father and daughter are not exactly great friends. The adventure proceeds—if you can call their trudging around and looking for water in an arid land an adventure.

By setting his story in the desert, Baba has already dictated the outlines of his film’s politics. And if that isn’t quite enough, there is the fact that the kid is clearly from the sub-Sahara and the man appears to be Arab, although Friday refers to him as white. Perhaps intentionally, the film’s quite handsome cinematography adds a layer of ambiguity to the old man’s actual race.

Baba’s decision to keep the film’s politics more implicit than explicit is admirable, focusing instead on the relationship of the two travelers. So that for some time, Oliver Black is a subdued buddy flick, despite the aridity of both place and dialogue. The repartee is enjoyable, leading the viewer to think of the film as primarily about the bonding between two men different in race, age, and ambition. What can a young man gain from an old man in a desert? Of what benefit is companionship to the old man? It seems these rather human questions are what his film is about. Until it becomes clear that Baba has wrongfooted his viewer.

One of the first scenes that alerts us to a switch in theme and temperature comes on a night so dark it is not clear just what has happened. We see Friday flee, another man apparently knocked out cold, and the old man screaming in the wake of the young man. Later, the word “rape” is used, with the boy crying, saying something along the lines of a black man wanting to hurt a black boy. I admit I was uncomfortable with the barefacedness of the whole thing, wanting something better than this have-your-cake-and-have-it scenario of black on black violence.

But when later, due to a twist that the director spells out clearly, it felt not quite right either. Could this be a sign that Baba is a great director of political dramas? I’m not sure. Baba is clearly talented and may even be brilliant, but the over-egging of his politics—which is the standard “Africa must develop Africa” creed touted by many politicians at home and abroad—makes it difficult to defend his artistry without some misgiving. And rather than explain the twist in the tale, Baba jumbles it up and then over-poeticizes it. The upshot is a lack of coherence tacked on to what has, until that moment, been a straightforward narrative. Perhaps the director thought his deeply felt story about African politics and development went over too easy and decided over-elaboration would correct the story’s simplicity?

Otherwise, Oliver Black is well-paced and it is quite remarkable what Baba gets from a paucity of characters in a setting marked mostly by dearth. Admittedly, the ending is wonky, but thankfully the rest of the film is worthy of attention.

Director, screenplay: Tawfik Baba
Producer: Rabab Aboulhassani, Tawfik Baba,
Executive producer: Daphna Ziman
Cast: Mohamed Elachi, Modu Mbow, Ilham Oujiri
Cinematography: Smail Touil
Editor: Yassin Jaber, Aissam Raja
Sound: Amine Arrom
Distributor: Cinémoi (USA)
Production Company: 7th Sense
Runtime: 93 minutes

Well, all a person who made that assumption now needs to do, to wipe off that thought, is to see his second feature film, This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. Its standalone magnificence is certain to provoke applause. It is entirely fair to accuse the film of having a pretentious title. But when a film is this good, its director has pretty much acquired every right to name his work however he desires. But more is needed to produce a film of such a high artistic achievement than a knack for long titles. This is Not a Burial is poetic but retains narrative coherence. It is concerned about an ordinary life but the film is itself extraordinary. It is rare for a work of obvious ambition to meet its match in a director’s power of execution, but that is what has happened here. That Mosese has written, directed and edited this film is even more remarkable.

Onscreen, the film belongs entirely to Mary Twala, its lead actress who has now passed on. She owns a face that clearly has seen anything the world has to throw her way. Which is a good thing because her character, Mantoa, is engaged in a fight with a government that wants to resettle her village. Where is an old woman go? As she tells anyone willing or even unwilling to listen, her land is the only life she has known, it is the place where her umbilical cord is buried, the place where her parents are buried. Why does the government want to see her buried elsewhere?

This is a film about both the inevitability of modernity and the all-conquering spirit of capitalism. But as shaped by Mosese and with Mary Twala‘s ferocious performance, this is also a film about a certain kind of defiance, the tough, enduring spirit of an old woman’s will to do battle for what she believes in. Her ancestor is Chinua Achebe’s popular hero Okonkwo. Famously, that man was against the eroding of his beloved Igbo culture by the white man—until a downfall caused partly by his own hubris.

There is no hubris to be found with Mantoa, even though, as with Okonkwo, her battle is both personal and communal. But unlike Achebe’s hero, Mosese’s is aware of her own inconsequence in the grand cosmic play of human existence, given that her concerns are more centered on her own death and not her life, which she understands is certain to end sooner. Why then does she deserve this grand treatment and our attention? Who knows? But the film takes it as a given and mythologizes her struggles, allowing the tale of her life be told by a narrator we see onscreen away from the action. As played by the South African actor Jerry Mofokeng, the narrator never really tells us if he is in the present, past, or future. But like us, he is awed by Mantoa’s life.

This layer of extra flourish is effective because of how the cinematography lights up the narrator, and for the relish Mofokeng himself takes with his excellent performance. In effect, Mosese has made a film filled with two great performances. That would have been enough—but his own virtuosity, too, is in full display. His second feature film is a masterpiece.

Director, writer, editor: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Cast: Mary Twala Mhlongo, Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha
Cinematographer: Pierre de Villiers
Costume design: Nao Serati
Music: Yu Miyashita
Producer: Elias Ribiero, Cait Pansegrouw, 
Distributors: Arizona Distribution (France) (theatrical), Elite Filmes (Brazil) (theatrical), Dekanalog (USA) (all media), Trigon-film (Switzerland) (all media)
Runtime: 117 minutes

In Spain, a Lagos-based engineer working at a printing press plans to go to Europe as he works his long Lagos hours. In one day, he loses his small family, consisting of his sister and kids, to generator fumes. His life is then split in three parts. One attempts to give his late relatives the burial they deserve. Another tries to do his job despite his increasing frustrations with some late-arriving junction boxes. The rest of his waking hours (and maybe even his dreams) are devoted to escape. He has to manage all of these in a dignified manner. In one scene, as he speaks to his family away from Lagos, informing them of the deaths, he begins to cry but even so, he is restrained. Whatever pains he may be feeling are evident only on his face, which is a monument to an ineffable mix between expressivity and repression. In casting Jude Akuwudike as Mofe, the film was already certain to be impressive. Akuwudike’s face is by itself an extremely effective visual effect.

In Italy, a country that should evoke both departure and transactional fornication for viewers familiar with Nigeria’s human traffic history, a young woman named Rosa looks for a path to Europe with her younger sister. Their would-be benefactress (comedian Chioma Omeruah in a surprisingly restrained role) wants the younger sister’s baby in exchange for making their dreams come true. There is probably nothing legal about any terms of their agreement but there is nothing comical about their lives either. The only thing in the air for Rosa in Nigeria is desperation. Soon enough she meets and dates a white man who is generous but is then taken to task by his friends for his gullibility. It doesn’t matter that Rosa isn’t playing him for a fool, given the depth of her lack—but her well-off compatriots see her as merely fraudulent.

That subplot is one of the ways Eyimofe probes the distance between the Nigerian wealthy and the Nigerian poor—a distance so wide each group could and really should be speaking different languages. In practical terms, Rosa’s fellow Nigerians who happen to be wealthy are much less dissimilar to Rosa than to the white man. Indeed, the rich are different from you and me.

In a couple of instances, the stories intersect and in one case there is a direct interaction between the movies. The directors handle everything with certitude, care, and gorgeously understated aplomb. The camerawork by Arseni Khachaturan is never intrusive even in its mobility. And by the time the film reaches its end, the characters, as written by Chuko Esiri, have experienced the devastation that is inevitable in the troughs of poverty and have altered their dreams. It is a bit unsettling to see that this granular exploration of Nigerian poverty is by the Esiri brothers who are themselves from exceptionally wealthy Nigerian stock. The politics at play behind this may be voyeuristic but they have accorded the poor a superb dignity. And there can be no real objections about the film they have made. Subtle as it is, Eyimofe is impressive from its opening shot to its last lines.

Directors: Chuko Esiri, Arie Esiri
Screenwriters: Chuko Esiri
Cast: Jude Akuwudike, Temi Ami-Williams, Cynthia Ebije, Chioma Omeruah, Toyin Oshinaike
Producers: Melissa O. Adeyemo, Chuko Esiri, Arie Esiri
Executive producers: Kayode Akindele, Albert Esiri, Ifeoma Esiri, Christopher Ibru, Maiden Alex Ibru, Olorogun Oskar Ibru, Toke Alex Ibru, Salman Zoueihed
Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan
Production designer: Taisa Malouf
Costume design: Daniel Obasi
Editing: Andrew Stephen Lee
Music: Akin Adebowale
Production companies: GDN Studios (Nigeria)
Runtime: 116 minutes