Nigeria Has Two Films at Tribeca 2026. One Won at Venice and the BFI. The Other Was Shot Over Thirteen Years in Kaduna With a Single Phone.

Film · International

The 25th Tribeca Festival runs June 3 to 14 in New York City. Two Nigerian-connected projects are in the lineup, both selected for the Viewpoints section — described by the festival as a showcase for directors who break rules, bend genres, and carve new cinematic paths. Neither title is the kind of Nollywood production that fills cinemas on Easter weekend. Both are worth knowing about.

One Woman, One Bra is a Kenya–Nigeria co-production directed by Kenyan filmmaker Vincho Nchogu and produced by Nigeria’s Josh Olaoluwa. The film follows Star, a young woman in a rural Kenyan village who discovers her childhood photograph on the cover of a book and begins searching for the identity that image implies she has. It stars Sarah Karei, Amos Leuka, Irungu Mutu, and Norng’aruani Kipuker. The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2025 under the Biennale College Cinema section, and subsequently won the Sutherland Award for Best First Feature at the BFI London Film Festival. Tribeca is its North American premiere.

Josh Olaoluwa’s involvement as producer is the Nigerian thread in the production — and it is the right kind of involvement: a Nigerian producer working with serious pan-African creative infrastructure to bring a project into the international conversation. That Olaoluwa could produce a Venice-to-BFI film with this kind of formal ambition and bring it to Tribeca as its next stop is a signal worth reading. It says something about what Nigerian creative producers can do when they are not chasing the domestic box office.

Crocodile is a different kind of project entirely. Co-directed by Pietra Brettkelly and The Critics — a filmmaking collective based in Kaduna — it is a documentary shot over thirteen years. In Kaduna, a group of children turn a backyard into a science fiction universe using a single mobile phone and what the Tribeca programme description calls “boundless imagination.” The film follows the collective across those years as creativity becomes both a lifeline and a deliberate act of rewriting their own futures. It is 101 minutes, in English, Pidgin, Hausa, and Yoruba, and it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.

The thirteen-year timeline is not incidental. A documentary that commits to that duration is making a statement about what it believes the story is — not a moment, not a scene, but a life in process. That the life in process is happening in Kaduna, in a city that carries in the international imagination primarily the weight of its violence and its instability, is the film’s most important formal argument: that creativity is happening here, quietly and consistently and without permission from the narrative the outside world has assigned to this place.

Nigeria has been present at Tribeca in recent years with purpose. In 2024, Daniel Oriahi’s The Weekend made its premiere there — the same film that subsequently landed an HBO Max deal for Central and Eastern Europe. In 2025, Wizkid: Long Live Lagos screened. Each year, the Nigerian presence at the festival is modest in number and deliberate in quality. Both titles in 2026 continue that pattern. Neither will gross ₦100 million at a Nigerian cinema. Both will be seen by international distributors, festival programmers, and critics who are deciding what African cinema is capable of. That is a different kind of influence than box office, and it is not a lesser kind.

One Woman, One Bra — Kenya/Nigeria · Dir. Vincho Nchogu · Prod. Josh Olaoluwa · Tribeca 2026 Viewpoints. Crocodile — Nigeria/New Zealand · Dir. The Critics & Pietra Brettkelly · Tribeca 2026 Viewpoints. Festival runs June 3–14, 2026, New York City.