Kilanko Was Allwell Ademola’s Final Film. It Deserves to Be Seen With That Knowledge.
Kilanko opened March 6. It was directed by Allwell Ademola, who passed away weeks before the film reached its widest audience. A story about an Abiku child, sickle cell disease, and a mother caught between traditional cosmology and modern medicine — it is the most thematically ambitious work of Ademola's career, and it is still in circulation.
Film · Industry
Kilanko opened in cinemas on March 6, 2026, the same day as Onobiren. It was directed by Allwell Ademola and produced by Rotimi Salami. Its story runs along the intersection of traditional belief and modern medicine, using the figure of an Abiku child — a spirit child of Yoruba cosmology, understood to arrive in the world with the intention of leaving it — as the lens through which to examine sickle cell disease, a mother’s grief, and the specific cruelty of a condition that modern medicine understands and cannot fully cure, coexisting with a cultural framework that explains it differently and demands different responses.
Allwell Ademola passed away in early 2026 before Kilanko reached its widest audience. He was a filmmaker whose working career had been sustained and serious, producing across a range of productions with consistent professional craft. Kilanko was the project that had the most thematic ambition of his career. It arrived at cinemas weeks after his death, which meant that the film’s commercial run unfolded as a posthumous release — a circumstance that changes how audiences encounter a work, and that changes what the industry owes the film in terms of attention and serious engagement.
The cast — Rotimi Salami, Saheed Balogun, Tina Mba, Ibrahim Chatta, Afeez Abiodun, among others — brings depth to material that, in lesser hands, would resolve too easily into either medical drama or spiritual parable. The film’s achievement, from what audiences and early critics have reported, is in resisting both resolutions and holding the tension between the two frameworks without pronouncing on which one is true.
A film about what a mother does when the language she was raised with tells her one thing and the hospital tells her another is a film about a problem that does not end. Kilanko understood that. Allwell Ademola understood that. The film is still in circulation. It deserves an audience that meets it seriously.
Kilanko — Dir. Allwell Ademola · Prod. Rotimi Salami · Opened March 6, 2026 · Currently in select cinemas.
Kate Adeyemi is NollyPrime's Senior Industry Correspondent. She has covered the business of Nigerian film and television for fourteen years.