“I hope I still have a full life that influences how I make films. I really like books, so what if my thing is that I make some books that I like into films?” – Moyosore Akinsete.
By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku
There is a wave of young, talented filmmakers reshaping Nollywood’s art of storytelling and bringing fresh perspectives to the industry. Among them is Moyosore Akinsete, born Moyosoreoluwa Gbemisola Akinsete, a twenty-six-year-old whose sophomore short film, Love, Olaitan, has been well recognised as one of the best from Nigeria in the past year.
Love, Olaitan screened at the Africa Film Festival (AFRIFF) 2024, one of the biggest film festivals in Africa, as well as that year’s edition of The Annual Film Mischief (TAFM), an annual film festival organised by the Film Rats Club and dedicated to screening quality independent films made by Africans.
The short has also been nominated for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, as well as the ‘Jury Award for Best Storytelling’, at The Filmjoint Awards (TFA) 2025, an awards event that celebrates short films.
I first encountered Moyosore Akinsete on the last day of TAFM. Love, Olaitan had just screened at the event to loud applause from a mostly teary audience. She excitedly took the stage, thanked the audience, sang praises to her crew who took the stage with her, and spoke about wanting to make a film with little to no dialogue. Her somewhat brief speech might have had more words than the entire sixteen minutes of her film.
You would not know it from Love, Olaitan, a deeply quiet film with only two occasions of speech, but Akinsete loves to talk. “I yap a lot”, she says at the start of our conversation in the early afternoon of International Women’s Day, as if to prepare me for what is to come. Then, she says it over and over, in Yoruba and in English, during the course of the interview: “I’m a yapper”.
We are seated in the cinema area of a Lagos mall, and our conversation lasts almost three hours, yet she never loses steam. She is soft-spoken but also vibrant and expressive—and she carries you along effortlessly.
Later, after we conclude the interview, she tells me that one of her friends had warned her not to talk too much, reminding her that it was an interview, not a chat with a friend. It might as well have been, with this cheerful and intelligent woman who, at times, turns the tables, interviewing the interviewer and listening with intense focus.
Perhaps, her attentiveness is to be expected. After all, she is a qualified lawyer who graduated with honours from the University of Ibadan and the daughter of two retired teachers who also trained an accountant daughter and a pharmacist son. “They’ve literally done their bit, so, now, it’s time for you to do your own”, she tells me. “I want to take care of my parents because they’ve sacrificed a lot for me. I don’t want them to pass on and all they ever did was sacrifice”.
It strikes me how openly she talks about death. I would eventually learn that she has grappled with the fear of loss of a parent and has come to accept it as a reality, even if she prays that it does not come anytime soon.
A few years back, her father had experienced a medical scare that forced her to confront her parents’ mortality. Her brother had also been sick then, and her mother had to stay with him in Ibadan. “I was the only one at home with my dad. I was really frightened. Now, he’s better, thank God, but for a while, he wasn’t himself, and that made me feel very strongly, and that just left a mark”.
It is that fear that Moyosore Akinsete revisits in Love, Olaitan, a heartwarming story about the bond between a daughter and father and about a daughter’s grief after her father’s death.
“I really wanted to talk about the bond between a dad and a daughter. It was important to me to sort of celebrate that. I think that was just an opportunity to show [that] loving someone also creates an avenue to get hurt by losing that person. I was just trying to show the love I think I share with my dad but [it] was a way of working through my fear, like an emotional purgatory for myself.”
In Love, Olaitan, we watch a girl grow under her father’s wings, two of them living alone in their home and relying on each other through thick and thin. Moyosore Akinsete uses minimal space and a living room couch to tell the story, and for most of the film, her characters sit in or around the same couch, eating, doing homework, learning about menstruation, and dying.
Before making the film, Akinsete had been fascinated by the idea of limited space and the personification of inanimate objects, partly inspired by the 2019 short film, Tokunbo, which follows a couple’s relationship through time with the camera perpetually trained on their car.
“It showed the very smallness of life and the bigness of life side by side,” she explains, “One day, they’re laughing; another day is a big life turning [event]. I think that car just boxed them in to show the contrasting parallel of all of that”.
But there was also the question of resources. It cost Moyosore Akinsete about two million naira to make Love, Olaitan. It would have cost considerably more if she’d had to shop for locations. Even the idea of portraying major life events, like graduations, had Akinsete worried. “Where I go find graduation gown?”
The solution was to keep the entire film within the confines of one space: a house, specifically her Lagos apartment. And since a chair is always constant, a shared space within a house, she set out with Ibukunoluwa Adisa, her production designer, in search of a very 2000s Nigerian middle-class couch, and the Love, Olaitan couch was rented from a prop rental store for thirty thousand naira per day.
“Have you always wanted to make film?” I ask her. Her response is an immediate “No”. She doesn’t hesitate, laughing as she reiterates “No, no.”
“What’s the story?” I ask.
She replies, “I’ve not always wanted to make films. I’ve always wanted to tell stories”.
As a child, whenever she was allowed to interact with neighbours, or when she had to stay back after church service while her parents attended meetings, Moyosore Akinsete would gather other children together to act out little plays―Let’s say you’re mummy, let’s say you’re daddy. She observes with a hint of amusement, “One of my childhood friends, after my first film dropped, she was like ‘You’re still doing this Let’s say’. Like, I always used to tell stories.”
“And direct them, apparently,” I chip in.
“I didn’t even know it was directing”, she responds, “But I just thought I was a control freak. I think books were my first love. I always loved reading [be]cause my parents rarely let us watch TV, actually”.
She does remember one occasion as a child when she got the chance to watch Hollywood’s Love and Basketball, and it stuck with her. “It made me feel very warm in my heart and, like, in my stomach.” But as children, Moyosore Akinsete and her siblings were generally only allowed to watch the news and educational shows like Kali and Tewa Show. She found books to be much more interesting, though, and her mother would bring books home from the school library.
One time, when Akinsete mentioned that she wanted to be like Genevieve Nnaji, her father was vehemently opposed to the sheer possibility of it. If she was ever going to be in films, they had to be Mount Zion productions or similar films. “So, I don’t think I’ve always wanted to make films. It just grew on me. It evolved into another means of storytelling”.
The pivotal point was during her time at the University. Law students are notoriously busy, but she made time to found a drama club called “Stentors” which she started with three friends from church and which eventually grew to ticketed events on campus.
“That was the first time I started to actually script down things,” she notes. “And I think that I started to want a bit more. It also coincided with a time [when] I started to watch more films. The kind of films I wanted to watch.”
It was at the University that she finally got the freedom to watch films, and the films that she watched made her feel warm. She also loved creating, and she loved watching people enjoy plays she had created.
For Moyosore Akinsete, her drama club was an escape. “It felt like law was actually the one draining me, and that (drama) was kind of nurturing me back in. So, now, it makes sense that I am able to somewhat balance film and law because it has always kind of been my trajectory.”
Akinsete has a day job, an unconventional one that she says is consuming but fulfilling. She would rather not share details, but she discloses that it involves law, story writing, and vulnerable clients. “I don’t want film to be my life”, she tells me, “It should be part of my life. I want to have a full life”.
Still, film may very well be the best part of her life, the way she talks about it. “There are times you get a bit depressed, and you’re like ‘Do you know what? I mean, if the trumpet sounds today, it will not be too bad.’ But I’m like, ‘Okay, maybe if the trumpet sounds after I’ve dropped my film or after I’ve written this idea’. It’s sort of like little pieces of joy that make life worth living; like, something that you’re genuinely excited by”.
How does she juggle it, though? I ask.
“I think because I have to. I have no choice, because I want to be comfortable,” she says with slight laughter. “I feel like I have to eat, but I also want to make film”.
She recites a Yoruba pun that her mother often tells her, then she explains: “If you’re passionate about something, and your feet are not on the ground, eventually, it will drain you and you will lose sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing. How I protect the story that I want to say is by making sure that it’s not what feeds me. I know that at some point, it most likely will not be that way, but right now, that’s where I’m at.”
Besides, Akinsete is not new to wearing multiple hats at the same time. While she was studying law and leading Stentors at the University of Ibadan, she also hosted two shows on the University’s radio station, Diamond FM. One of them was a Friday show called “UI Gists”, while the other was a legal show called “Legal Hour” where she discussed law topics in a relatable story-like manner and sometimes invited lecturers to join her.
Perhaps, the only time Moyosore Akinsete did not have to juggle too much was when she was at the Nigerian Law School, Abuja, but it was not for want of trying. She had applied to Ebonylife Creative Academy but was not accepted. She did start a YouTube vlog formerly called “Media Meets Law” (now “Moyosore’s POV”) where she chronicled her law school journey and her frustrations when school shut down as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
She would re-apply for the Ebonylife Creative Academy 2022 screenwriting programme, while undertaking her National Youth Service at the Mediation Department of the Ministry of Justice, Lagos, in addition to a job at a law firm.
This time, she would get accepted, and she would learn about the personification of inanimate objects for the first time in one of the classes which involved a viewing of the 2018 Canadian short film, Chesterfield¸ where the protagonist gets stranded with a couch and has to drag it home across the city.
But Moyosore Akinsete would struggle through the screenwriting programme because of her extremely busy schedule, and by the end of it, her concept would not get selected to be made into a film.
Suddenly, directing, which had always seemed to her like a far-away dream that she would probably only get to doing in her forties, would become attractive. Her rejected script would be made into a film, even if she had to do it herself. “Something about me is, I’m not delulu, but I can be very delulu.”
Fortunately, she has extremely supportive friends and family. Hyped up by her sister, Mayowa Akinsete, who is clueless about filmmaking, and in collaboration with Hope Eniayekan (who would later act as casting director and associate producer on Love, Olaitan) as a co-director and other friends some of whom had never made a film before, and after a mild panic attack on the first day of the two-day shoot, she made her debut film the same year: Never Enough.
A film about a beautiful, high-flying young woman in a toxic relationship, Never Enough explores themes of body positivity and emotional abuse. “Maybe my work influenced it. I worked in the Violence Against Women Act Team. I spoke to a lot of people about the abuse they were going through. Also, I was getting into my woman body. In Uni, I was slim. But one day, my body just blew up.
“There’s just like different comments about your body, and they’re not from people that hate you, I think. Sometimes, I wish I did not launch with such a heavy topic, because I feel like I could have approached it better, but at the time, that was one of the things that [were] heavy in my heart”.
Love, Olaitan, as well, came up as a means to tackle insecurities. The “immediate propellant” for the film was an American series called Modern Love, an anthology of short films some of which explored human connections. Moyosore Akinsete watched Modern Love just before she plunged into writing Love, Olaitan.
“I love Modern Love,” she says with a softness, like it was a life-changing experience. And, perhaps, it was. “The films there, they made me feel. I felt like the world could just pause. That’s so cheesy, I know, but it just feels like I’m walking bare naked around the world for that particular period of time.”
But it was really the inadequacies she felt during and after the making of Never Enough, in addition to her father’s health scare, that informed Love, Olaitan. As a writer who loves to talk, she had relied on dialogue in the writing of Never Enough. But as a lover of films that tug at the heart, she was unsatisfied.
“I noticed that a lot of films that did that, it was in talking, but it was also in the quiet moments. That’s kind of what drew me into film, and that’s what I was trying to also do. But I did not have the know-how. All I had was desire”.
Plus, Akinsete wanted to work on her fear of cameras. Although years of directing actors on the small stage prepared her for directing actors for the screen, she was intimidated by the cameras and had to hide behind Eniayekan and the cinematography team.
“I’m not ashamed of it (Never Enough). It was really like jumping into the deep, but there was also a lot of hiding,” she tells me. “Usually, I am generally self-confident. Not thriving in something I liked made me feel very insecure”.
It surprises me to hear that a lack of confidence was partly an inspiration for Love, Olaitan. The film itself does not betray that, but even more importantly, the young woman sitting across the table from me is undeniably confident, self-aware, self-assured, and entirely capable−Akinsete became an editor overnight after her paid editor abandoned the project without explanation.
“It might be selfish, but Love Olaitan has done the work I need it to do for me. So, if the world appreciates it, I hope they do, amazing. But I’ve used it. What I see in it is resilience and determination and what I learned as a person, and speaking up for myself, and expressing. It made me a bit more comfortable enough to say, okay, maybe I’m a filmmaker, maybe I should actually learn more about filmmaking, beyond ‘my heart is warm’ [to] the mechanics of it. That way, it will help me say what I want to say better.”
Eager to learn what she calls the “mathematics of filmmaking”, Akinsete has taken filmmaking classes, including a directing class by Daniel Oriahi, the multi award-winning director of Sylvia (2018) and The Weekend (2024), and intends to go to film school.
I ask where she hopes to be, as a filmmaker, in the next five years. Akinsete does not talk about awards or mainstream success, neither is she focused on quantity of projects.
“I hope that I would have gotten the tools, these mechanics and technicals that sometimes scare me. I hope I still have my warm heart, regardless. If it’s just one film, I hope it’s a film that has challenged me and helped me grow as a person, that it’s a story that I actually want to tell and I told it in a very, very beautiful way, and I hope that there [are] people that connect to it. I hope I still have a full life that influences how I make film. I really like books, so what if my thing is that I make some books that I like into films? I hope I’d have made one feature, full of heart and a good story that I really, really like. I hope that I’m more in my now growing phase rather than in the foundation phase.”
Love, Olaitan will be available for public viewing on Moyosore Akinsete’s YouTube channel, “Moyosore’s POV” from Saturday, 15th March 2025 by 12:00 noon.
Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a writer, film critic, TV lover, and occasional storyteller writing from Lagos. She has a master’s degree in law but spends most of her time reading about and discussing films and TV shows. She’s particularly concerned about what art has to say about society’s relationship with women. Connect with her on Twitter @Nneka_Viv