Nigeria and UK / 2021 / 14mins / Drama / English and Yoruba

Salewa must return home for her mother’s funeral, to Lagos, a place where she once had to hide herself. At the funeral, she runs into an important person from her past, and is forced to go in search of her own peace. Egúngún (Masquerade) is a meditation on home, memory, and identity—on the many versions of ourselves that haunt us.

Olive Nwosu

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Olive Nwosu is a BAFTA Pigott 2020 Scholar, Alex Sichel Fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts, and an ‘African Promises’ director selected by the Institut Français. Troublemaker, Olive’s 2019 short film – set in rural Nigeria and featuring entirely non-actors – is currently playing at festivals around the world. The film played at Clermont Ferrand Film Festival, Raindance, Africa in Motion Film Festival and Aspen ShortsFest amongst others. It received a 2020 NBR Student Award, Best Student Film Prize at Discover Film Festival London, and Best Shorts Director Prize at Queens World Film Festival, New York. Olive’s second short, Egúngún (Masquerade), has recently been commissioned by the British Council and British Film institute for their MoreFilms4Freedom program. Her work is informed by the fragmentary nature of her life experiences across multiple continents and identities. Themes focus on the place of the outsider, and African, challenging the status-quo of whom and what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on screen. Olive is developing her first feature film with Deivós and Film4. Learn More