Premium
The 13th edition of NollywoodWeek Film Festival (NOW) opens today at Cinéma L'Arlequin under the theme "Voyage" — a literal and figurative frame echoed at both ends of the program. Co-founders Serge Noukoué and Nadira Shakur open with "East West Love," Tanzanian filmmaker Seko Shamte's Kenya-Nigeria romantic comedy about a post-breakup escape to Mombasa, and close with "Ogene," a Nigeria-Japan collaboration named after the Igbo metal gong and the music built around it. The 2026 edition adds a formal industry partnership with the Nigerian International Film Summit (NIFS), a French-Cameroonian festival ambassador in Thomas Ngijol, and a delegation visit to Canal+'s headquarters, with a multi-country slate arriving in Paris against visa headwinds the festival has had to plan around.
A year ago, when I spoke with the co-founder couple — also the first official media partnership for African Film Press (AFP) — Noukoué described NOW as "in a period of reevaluation." Streaming had reordered the industry, COVID had redrawn the audience, and he and Shakur were openly weighing whether the corrective they had built — a Black-led, Paris-based platform for African and diaspora cinema, deliberately outside the French public-arts funding system — still made sense as just that. A market component was being floated. None of it was structured yet. A year on, it is.
