Nine AFRIFF 2025 filmmakers with momentum — and the films that brought them here
As AFRIFF settles back into Lagos for its 14th edition, a familiar truth is already evident on the ground: this festival is now where emerging African and diaspora voices debut work that tends to travel.
Many of this year’s titles have already picked up early heat at festivals across Europe and North America, making AFRIFF less a proving ground and more the place where the next cohort of directors step into the continental spotlight.
Here are eight filmmakers whose work at AFRIFF is arriving with real industry attention.
Zoey Martinson (The Fisherman – Ghana / US)
Martinson’s feature arrives at AFRIFF after a buzzy run through the North American fall circuit. A theatre-maker, writer and filmmaker working out of New York and Accra, she is best known for the Tribeca-premiering The Fisherman — a human drama that folds grief, migration and memory into a coastal mystery. Her shift into features has drawn interest for how she blends performance methodology with cinematic language.
Grace Yakubu (Aljana – Nigeria)
Yakubu’s short has quietly made the rounds in Europe this year, landing particularly well with programmers in social-issue and emerging-voices strands. Aljana is rooted in Northern Nigeria, exploring girlhood and agency with a spare, observational style. Yakubu is considered part of the new wave of Nigerian filmmakers building internationally-minded cinema outside Lagos and the diaspora capitals.
Nana Obiri-Yeboah (The Funeral Of Kwadae – Ghana)
Obiri-Yeboah has been building steadily from genre shorts and music-video craft to long-form work. The Funeral Of Kwadae is the first time international programmers have started to talk about him as “one to watch” — blending folklore, superstition and family tragedy with authorial control that feels more like a debut feature than a short.
Angela Aquereburu (Mikoko – Togo)
Based between Lomé and Paris, Aquereburu is already known in Francophone West Africa for series work (Agoji) — but Mikoko is the title breaking her to Anglophone buyers. It screened in the spring at Clermont-Ferrand sidebars, sparking early interest in her environmental-justice storytelling and her ability to build cinematic worlds from local ecology and community memory.
Daniel Aigbokhaivbo (Mr Rogers – Nigeria)
Aigbokhaivbo has been part of Nigeria’s quiet short-film excellence pipeline for years — but Mr Rogers is the one international programmers have actually been sharing links to. Restrained, psychological, and character-forward, it’s the kind of short that suggests a director already thinking in feature form.
Chawuko Enakadia & Muhammad Atta Ahmed (Seed – Ghana / Nigeria)
This co-directed short is the film that keeps being mentioned in buyer meetings — not because of scale, but because of its control. A slow, methodical, almost forensic film about inheritance and violence, Seed premiered earlier in the year in East Africa and has quietly built a reputation on the circuit. The fact that it’s co-directed across two countries is also notable: this is the direction West African collaboration is heading.
Tristan Barrocks (Sugar Dumplin – Canada / Barbados)
Tristan Barrocks is a writer, producer, and director. His film Dear Black Dad, released digitally, has garnered critical acclaim for its authenticity and truth. Wallflower (Webseries 2023), Connecting the Dots (Docuseries 2019), and Mother To Mother (Special 2022) are note-worth instalments to Tristan's directorial catalogue. Sugar Dumplin is a scripted short is the proof of concept for a feature in packaging.
Nyasha Kadandara (Matabeleland – Zimbabwe / Kenya)
Kadandara’s doc work has screened everywhere from Hot Docs to IDFA — but Matabeleland is her boldest, most political and most formally precise film to date. Asteadic in lensing and rigorous in structure, it examines memory, atrocity and erasure with a hand that feels closer to essay cinema than mainstream documentary. She is already in early development on her first feature.
Rashida Seriki (United Kingdom / Nigeria)
A British-Nigerian writer director based in London, Seriki has been building a quiet but serious CV across shorts, comedy and television. Her breakout short The Fence won multiple prizes in 2018 and put her on the BFI Future Film radar. She followed with Colby which premiered at BFI London Film Festival, and Maneater for BBC Comedy which aired on BBC Three and iPlayer. As a writer she has contributed to We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4 and Peacock) and EastEnders, with her original series Lovelessville currently in development with VAL and ITV. Her debut feature is now in development and Colby serves as its proof of concept. Seriki is part of the small cluster of British based Nigerian talent whose television muscle is beginning to intersect with an emerging feature voice.
Why these nine matter this year
What links this group beyond national variety is that all of them arrive at AFRIFF with some degree of festival pedigree already behind them. In other words they are not discoveries. They are filmmakers who are in the process of crossing over from promising to bankable.
