“I know that Water Girl will find its audience and, at the right time, get a distribution deal. It will really come, so I’m just waiting till that time” – Nnamdi Kanaga.
By Adedamola Adedayo
When Nnamdi Kanaga was younger, Old Nollywood films like Egg of Life (2003) and Sympathy (2004) attracted him to African mythology. During his college years in Enugu, he encountered Wole Soyinka’s “Abiku”, a poem based on the Yoruba belief in an impish spirit-child, for the first time, which reinforced the attraction. By 2019, while living in Montana in the United States, he began brainstorming, drawing from the wealth of story ideas he had absorbed over the years, for what would be his sophomore directorial feature-length project, Water Girl.
“In the movie I referenced Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa,” Kanaga says over a Google Meet call. “Their novels, Joys of Motherhood, Things Fall Apart, and Efuru, inspired me a lot. Also, there’s this novel titled Dizzy Angel by Gracy Osifo”.
Water Girl, a supernatural drama film, is set in Montana and follows 18-year-old Kamsi (Moriyahfaith Jackson), an Ogbanje girl whose Nigerian mother, Nkechi (Stella Damasus), must do everything to save her from dying. Rooted in Igbo spirituality, the film conceptualises ‘Ogbanje’, a phenomenon in which an afflicted child makes repeated, cyclical journeys between the natural and metaphysical realms. Ogbanje are believed to possess an iyi-uwa, a mystical object that serves as their link to companions in the spirit world.
“I started working on the script that year [2019], but the story kept evolving and changing until 2023 when I completed it”, he recalls. Throughout the writing stage of Water Girl, Kanaga admits, the gender of the central character kept changing, until the filmmaker was sure he wanted it to be a girl. He explains that he conducted extensive research, exploring numerous ideas he hoped to include in the film. The story contains references to Ghanaian and American cultures, which he claims is a deliberate creative attempt at presenting a refreshing perspective on the familiar cultural concept he was portraying. Although he had a solid draft by 2023, he still made revisions just two days before shooting began in 2024.
“I always knew I would carve a niche for myself in the horror or psychological thriller genre”, Nnamdi Kanaga says. “But all my stories would somehow be rooted in African mythology, whether it’s Ogbanje, reincarnation, etc. I have always been inspired by these mythologies and wanted to make movies from them”.
In 2018, Nnamdi Kanaga migrated to the US in pursuit of his Master’s. There, his heart was drawn to screenwriting and directing. He made his directorial debut with The Hail Mary (2021), an experimental film with an all-black cast, shot in Montana, and currently streaming on Prime Video USA.
Back in Nigeria, he had nursed lofty acting dreams. Born to a military father, he grew up on the Nigeria Air Force Base in Ikeja, Lagos, where he attended the resident Protestant church and took part in numerous church drama productions. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he honed his craft as an emerging actor and filmmaker.
When the Nollywood roles he aspired to were not forthcoming, he turned to make-up as an alternate entry point into the industry. Working closely with fast-rising makeup and special effects artist, Carina Ojoko, he gained recognition. His acting, however, remained limited to mostly ‘waka pass’ appearances with only a few leads. Years later, after leaving Nigeria, he would make a notable comeback, returning to Nollywood to star alongside Richard Mofe-Damijo in the Nigerian film, Revelations, which was released in the cinemas in August 2025.
An interesting feature of Water Girl is its tragic resolution, where the desire to redeem Kamsi results in the magical disappearances of Nkechi’s lover, Obinani (Kenneth Okolie), Kamsi’s boyfriend, Jennings (Oliver Harden), and Kamsi herself. There are at least two explanations for this tragic tilt. One is the filmmaker’s penchant for Greek and African tragedies. The second is a personal history with grief, having lost a brother eleven years ago and his father six years later, which his memoir, Onwuchekwa: Death Waits… accounts for.
Nnamdi Kanaga remembers that when Stella Damasus first read the script of Water Girl, she was not pleased with Nkechi not getting some kind of redemption. Even so, other people who read the script, including his crew members, shared a similar dissatisfaction. Yet, this ending, Kanaga says, was milder than that of the initial draft, where Nkechi jumped into the river and drowned after realising everything was over for her.
One of the potential investors Nnamdi Kanaga had reached out to suggested the filmmaker bring in a pastor who would pray and heal Kamsi, which Kanaga refused. Nothing, it seemed, was going to stop the filmmaker from showing the unpredictable nature of human existence; the fact that people don’t always end up getting what they think they deserve. A similar sentiment runs through Kenneth Gyang’s Confusion Na Wa (2013), particularly in its ending, where an innocent friend is mistakenly murdered in place of the guilty one.
“If you think about it, Nkechi is not all that innocent, too”, Kanaga defends the tragic ending of Water Girl. “She went to the water for sacrifice, and whatever she got at the end of the day is deserved. In a way, if you put your hand in evil, you will get paid back in evil”.
There is yet another explanation for the resolution of Water Girl, which is linked to its ecological symbolism. “The ending for me is also very poetic because I was trying to tell people in a metaphorical way that when you keep on taking from nature, when nature wants to take back from you, there will be no looking back”, he says. “Think about this in terms of climate change. When erosion wants to attack, it doesn’t come easily. That was what I was looking at too”.
Casting for Water Girl required negotiating identity politics. “Being here, you are torn between trying to be relevant back in Nigeria and in the country of migration”. As a Nigerian filmmaker in the diaspora, there was that initial question of whether to pander to his host country or shoulder the weight of his roots. Thankfully, he was decisive. He wanted to be Nigerian without trying to be so, and prioritised casting Nigerian actors alongside other foreign talents.
Once he started working on the script, Stella Damasus came to his mind. He knew she was versatile and needed her for a role different from the Damsel in Distress or dutiful wife archetype she was commonly associated with in Old Nollywood. He also felt many people did not know she was Igbo and wanted to explore that part of her identity in the narrative. “For her to play the character of a mom to an eighteen-year-old girl was something we hadn’t seen before”, he adds.
The choice of Kenneth Okolie as Obinani makes sense since the filmmaker wanted a physically attractive man who would be a parody of the Prince Charming archetype in a way that, while trying to save the metaphoric Damsel, he ends up needing to be saved too. “When you expect to see a romance between him and Stella, it just becomes something else”, Kanaga says. Their short-lived romance helps the film to subvert the predictable trajectory of many Nollywood films where romantic love intersects with and overpowers the challenges that come by.
In the film, Florence Onuma plays Dr. Ada, the counsellor who guides Nkechi. Kanaga says he found her in Maryland in the United States, visited her office, and persuaded her to take on the motherly role. With other actors, it seemed it was simply a matter of talking to them and convincing them to come on board.
Kanaga had to rewrite several scenes to accommodate the actors because of the intense cold in Montana. There is, for instance, a scene in the film where the masquerade carries a baby. Kanaga says it was going to be Stella playing that role, but the cold prevented her from doing so. “I had to think of an alternative and make the masquerade character a thing throughout the film”, he says. He recalls another scene involving Kamsi and Jennings on the mountain top, which was extremely cold, with the actors freezing even though they executed their roles with such professionalism that no one noticed their discomfort. All this unfolded while Kanaga worked with a modest twenty-thousand-dollar budget.
Since its release, Water Girl has been through a festival circuit that includes the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival (MVAAFF), Flathead Lake International Cinefest, Caribbean Film Festival, British Urban Film Festival (BUFF), and Black Star International Film Festival (BSIFF), Ghana. It recently screened at the Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival (ENIFF), held from 26th to 29th of November, 2025, where it won Best Narrative Feature at the ENIFF Awards.
Reflecting on the hassles of independent filmmaking, Kanaga hopes he is connected with aggregators and distributors that will find favour in the film and decide to distribute it. “I am hopeful that after the festival runs, I get to do cinema in Nigeria or straight to streamers like Netflix and Prime Video. I know that Water Girl will find its audience and, at the right time, get a distribution deal. It will really come, so I’m just waiting till that time”.
Adedamola Adedayo is a film journalist and critic with special interest in African cinema. Through writing and audiovisual mediums, he creates conversations around cinema in Africa and the Diaspora. You can find him on Instagram @jonesthegoodboy and X on AdedamolaAdeda4.