Damilola Orimogunje On Making Venice History With ‘Dear Ajayi’ 

Damilola Orimogunje is set to make a small piece of African cinema history this week in Venice, where he will become the first Nigerian filmmaker to debut a feature in the Giornate degli Autori competition with his sophomore directorial effort, Dear Ajayi.

“I’m absolutely thrilled,” Orimogunje says of his historic Venice selection, speaking with Deadline from Lagos, ahead of his trip to Europe. “Venice is one of the most remarkable festivals to play in as a filmmaker. I’m deeply honored and proud.” 

Orimogunje directed Dear Ajayi from a screenplay he wrote. He also produced the film alongside Ajah Enene-Orimogunje and Bose Oshin. The film is a Nigerian-German co-production and follows two sisters, Ade and Titi Ajayi, in 1990s Southwestern Nigeria, who lead vastly different lives under the shadow of their late father’s home. Ade, a devout Christian and the family’s sole breadwinner, struggles to understand her younger sister Titi, an aspiring singer whose independent spirit challenges convention. When their ailing mother comes to live with them, old resentments resurface, forcing both women to confront grief, faith, ambition, and the fragile bonds that hold a family together.

Orimogunje completed the film’s script in 2017 and initially intended for it to be his debut feature. The inspiration for the story, he explains, came from “studying my environment.”

“The people around me, family, friends, and even people that I see from afar. I would just try to understand the depth of what they carry that isn’t so obvious to others,” he says. “Also, how they are misjudged or misunderstood by society. That really interested me.” 

Orimogunje also found inspiration a little further away from home. 

“I saw Ida by Paweł Pawlikowski, and that inspired me to make an intimate film about two women and their bond. That really helped me to get started with this story,” he explains, adding that he didn’t have the resources in 2017 to mount a production for Dear Ajayi.

“We would have had to shoot it outside of Lagos, where I live, which meant moving the entire crew to a different state. That requires money and many moving parts,” he explains. “Even just getting access to the songs I wanted to use would have been very difficult. I needed to make a first film to really show what I could do.” 

This led Orimogunje to make For Maria Ebun Pataki (2020), which premiered at Film Africa London and won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. As a producer, Orimogunje’s credits also include All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White (2023), which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won the Teddy Award for Best Feature.

“Over the years, I realized that beyond the financial constraints, I needed to grow as a filmmaker,” he says of the intervening time. “I needed to grow as a human to be able to tell the story honestly.”

Orimogunje’s company, 2O9INE Films, is the lead producer on Dear Ajayi. Orimogunje raised production financing through private equity and found funding for post-production in Germany. The co-producers are Mayana Films, Depth and Optics Productions, and Zynox Productions.

Dear Ajayi is the latest of several recent Nigerian productions to debut at a major festival. Earlier this year, Olive Nwosu’s Lagos shot-and-set Lady debuted at Sundance, and Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow toured the festival circuit last year after a buzzy Cannes debut. 

“We all grew up on films,” Orimogunje says of Nigeria’s current crop of international filmmakers. 

“We had the peak time of Nollywood, which was birthed in 1992, and we all grew up within that. It was a huge deal. Everybody knew the biggest actors and filmmakers. Growing up on that made a lot of us interested in making films. It certainly did for me.”

Orimogunje says the difference between Nigerian filmmakers working today and previous generations is what he describes as a “consciousness to be more intentional about the kind of films we make.”

“We’ve realized that there is more that Nigeria can offer,” he says. “We can make films that can resonate globally.”

While Nigerian and wider African filmmakers continue to find acclaim on the festival circuit, theatrical distribution on the continent remains challenging. Speaking with Deadline last year about her latest feature, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, filmmaker Rungano Nyoni said that despite debuting in Cannes, where she won an award, she still didn’t have a distributor in her home country, Zambia: “The distributors just aren’t interested,” she said. 

As such, Orimogunje says it was a priority for him to land a theatrical release in Nigeria for Dear Ajayi, and he has partnered with local distributor FilmOne Entertainment. 

“We have a cinema release date of November 13 in Nigeria. The film will be distributed nationwide, and it will be one of the first to do so,” he says. “Usually, when a film goes the festival route, it will be a year or more before it returns to Nigeria. I wanted this to be different. If I have made a film about my people, I need them to see it as much as people outside the country.” 

Orimogunje adds that he and the distributor are also discussing adding some other West African territories to their release. 

Luminalia is handling world sales on Dear Ajayi. The film screens tomorrow in Venice.