“Evil Has No Tribe.” Daniel Etim Effiong on The Herd, the Roads, and What It Costs to Make a Film About Something Real.

Interview · Film

Daniel Etim Effiong sat down with NollyPrime’s Rotimi Fash in Lagos to discuss The Herd, his journey from engineering to the director’s chair, what the film’s AMVCA nominations mean to him, and what he believes Nigerian cinema owes its audience.

NollyPrime: The Herd starts from a very personal place. Can you tell us where it actually began?

It started with memory, honestly. When I was growing up, my family would take road trips across Nigeria. Long drives. And those trips were associated for me with something warm — bonding, movement, the sense that the country was yours to cross. Then at some point I started paying attention to what has happened to those same roads. The kidnappings. The ambushes. Families who went to a wedding and did not come home the same. That shift — from roads that meant connection to roads that mean danger — is what I could not stop thinking about. I kept asking myself: who is telling this story in a way that doesn’t look away from it? And eventually I understood that I was supposed to be one of the people who tells it.

You chose to direct and star simultaneously. Was there a moment when you questioned that decision?

Every day of production. [Laughs.] But the honest answer is that I needed to be in the film to understand what I was asking of the other actors. Gosi is the character whose moral choices frame the film’s argument. If I was going to direct performances that sat in that same moral territory, I needed to inhabit it myself. I could not direct Genoveva from the outside and ask her to go somewhere I had not been. So the dual role was partly practical necessity and partly the only way I could make the film I wanted to make.

Genoveva Umeh has an AMVCA nomination for Best Lead Actress off this film. What did you see in that performance while you were making it?

What she did with Derin is something I am still processing. The role asks her to move between joy and absolute terror in the same film, sometimes in the same scene. And she does it without losing the specific quality that makes Derin — she never becomes generic suffering. She stays specific. That specificity is what makes the audience stay with her. An actor who remains a person under extreme pressure rather than becoming a symbol of it — that is a very difficult thing to achieve, and she did it consistently across the entire shoot.

There has been some criticism about the ethnic dimensions of the film’s premise. You have addressed this publicly. What is your position?

My position has not changed. Evil has no tribe. The specific crime the film depicts — the armed men who take the convoy — is not the behaviour of an ethnic group. It is the behaviour of people who are operating in a system that has failed them and that they have in turn chosen to exploit through violence. To watch this film and take from it a message about any particular Nigerian community is to refuse what the film is actually about. The film is about what happens to ordinary people in a country that has not protected them. The perpetrators are men who made choices. Their ethnicity is not the explanation for those choices.

Thirty million Netflix views. Nine AMVCA nominations. ₦190 million at the box office. What does it feel like to have a debut land like this?

It feels like obligation. Those numbers mean that a lot of people gave the film their time and their attention. That is not something to be comfortable about — it is something to be worthy of. The next film has to be better. Not because the numbers demand it, but because the subject demands it. There are more stories that need to be told about Nigeria with the same seriousness. I have a responsibility to tell them at the standard those subjects deserve.

What is next?

Something I am not ready to talk about yet. But it is about Nigeria. It is always about Nigeria.

The Herd is streaming on Netflix. The 12th AMVCA ceremony is May 9, 2026, Lagos.