Lady

A vibrant portrait of a young Nigerian woman navigating a hard-knock life of patriarchal pressure and personal trauma, Lady is the highly assured feature debut from Lagos-born, London-based writer-director Olive Nwosu. Stylishly shot, this visually and musically rich character study mostly plays like a thriller with political undertones, compelling and propulsive, if a little too reliant on soapy melodrama at times.

Making its European debut at the Berlinale this week fresh from a prize-winning Sundance premiere, Lady has plenty to say about gender politics, government corruption and lingering postcolonial attitudes, in Nigeria and beyond. With international backing from the Sundance Institute, the BFI, Film4 and others, it is a welcome addition to the growing canon of British-Nigerian productions scoring prestige festival slots and positive international reviews, following C.J Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) and Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow (2025).

Framing her Lagos locations in luscious neon colours and dynamic camerawork, Nwosu thankfully resists the earnest social-realist aesthetic that can afflict European diaspora depictions of Africa. The dialogue is mostly in Nigerian Pidgin English, an unofficial lingua franca widely spoken across the country. It has the pleasantly salty, twisty, code-switching energy of polyglot street poetry, but will unavoidably require subtitles for audiences outside Nigeria, and probably for some within too.

Lady opens with a deceptively sunny, dreamy flashback, playfully framed with an upside-down shot of the shanty town dwellings that line Lagos Lagoon. This is the viewpoint of teenage daydreamers Lady (Petra Effoing) and Pinky (Mitchelle Oluwafemi), who are about to learn a jarring life lesson which Nwosu initially does not disclose, maintaining a sense of slow-burn suspense for the first half of the film. Lost innocence and unresolved psychological damage will later become key dramatic themes.

The main narrative takes place several years later. The adult Lady is now a tough but guarded young woman (Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah) holding down her own independent career as one of the few female taxi drivers on the traffic-choked highways of Lagos. As she criss-crosses a sprawling metropolis forever on the brink of popular mutiny over spiralling fuel prices and deepening economic inequity, her life is one of daily struggle and limited choices. Even so, she puts on a brave face to her chauvinistic co-workers, and serves as kindly unofficial carer to her elderly neighbours. Meanwhile, she is quietly saving up for her long-term dream of escape to Freetown in Sierra Leone, her mother’s birthplace, where she believes a better life of ease and emancipation awaits.

Resurfacing after a long absence, the adult Pinky (Amanda Oruh) tracks Lady down to share a tearful reunion and a risky business proposal. Pinky explains she is now a sex worker, and her slick pimp boss Fine Boy (Bucci Franklin) needs a reliable driver to ferry girls to their high-rolling clients at clubs, mansions and parties around Lagos. Repelled by sex and men since her childhood trauma, Lady initially resists this Faustian deal. But the money is good, enough to make her Freetown fantasy a reality, so she grudgingly agrees. Inevitably, this opens the door onto a world of trouble.

Music runs through Lady like water, with Ollie Mayo’s luscious, wafting Afro-jazz score punctuated by more frenetic, funky tracks by British-Nigerian rising stars like Little Simz and Obongjayar. The late Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti is also a key presence on the soundtrack. Indeed, the film’s title may even been an allusion to his contentious 1972 song “Lady”, deemed a sexist statement by some, a problematic African feminist anthem by others.

In a further audience-winking echo, Kuti’s musician son Seun has a voice-over role in the film as a radical radio DJ whose rousing sermons about inequality and the legacy of slavery soundtrack the film’s protest matches, recalling Samuel L. Jackson’s similar chorus character in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989). The street protests over declining fuel subsidies, rising prices and political corruption that pepper this story are firmly rooted in reality, a fixture in Nigeria for more than a decade.

Painted in broad strokes and primary colours, Lady is best approached on the level of heightened melodrama rather than naturalistic drama. Lady is a virginal innocent craving a simple dream of freedom, Pinky the classic whore with a heart of gold, Fine Boy the suavely dangerous bad-boy, and so on – all thronged by a sassy ensemble of sharp-tongued sex workers. These are stock character archetypes, though admittedly with more to say about feminism and colonialism than most B-movie players.

Lady culminates in a belated political awakening, which feels a little forced and contrived. Even so, the overall narrative package has an inner logic, a satisfying sense of closure, an alluring look and a great soundtrack. Nwosu makes a big splash with this confident debut, hopefully opening the doors for a richer range of African big-screen stories.

Director, screenwriter: Olive Nwosu
Cast: Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, Amanda Oruh, Tinuade Jemiseye, Binta Ayo Mogaji, Seun Kuti, Bucci Franklin, Agu Ghineye Esthyraph, Precious Agu Eke, Fadesaye Olateru-Olabegi, Eva Ibiam
Cinematography: Alana Mejia Gonzalez, Muhammad Atta Ahmed
Editors: Colin Monie, Gareth C. Scales.
Music: Ollie Mayo
Producers: Alex Polunin, John Giwa-Amu, Stella Nwimo
Production companies: Ossian International (UK)
World sales: Hanway Films, London
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In English, Nigerian Pidgin
93 minutes