On June 24, 2025, Nigeria and Brazil signed their first official co-production treaty for film, television, and digital content. Akoroko covered the announcement in real time and published a detailed breakdown of what the agreement could mean, and what still hasn’t been put in place.
Subsequently, I found myself wondering not just about its future impact, but also about any earlier links—specifically, whether Nigeria and Brazil had ever worked together in a film or screen context before this treaty.
Naturally, I started at the beginning, with the pioneers, and it didn’t take long before it brought me back to Ola Balogun, the Nigerian trailblazer I’ve previously discussed in various contexts on this platform, although not recently. During the early post-independence period, his career intersected with Brazil in ways that few documented African filmmakers attempted at the time.
Balogun is widely cited as a foundational figure in Nigerian cinema history. But he’s rarely included in the canon of African cinema pioneers, especially in continental and festival discourses shaped by Francophone institutions. His films were made and released under entirely different conditions: not backed by long-term institutional support, not restored or recirculated with public funding, not widely shown outside Nigeria. His legacy exists, but it’s fragmented. So returning to his work right now, especially in light of renewed Nigeria–Brazil cultural agreements, made sense.
“Black Goddess” (“A Deusa Negra,” 1978) and “Gods of Africa in Brazil” (1998) sit across twenty years in Balogun’s career, but they are linked by the same central concern: how Yoruba identity, belief, and memory survive across the Atlantic. One is a scripted story set across different time periods; the other, Balogun’s last film, documents a Candomblé ceremony in 1990s Brazil. Both films focus on how African spiritual and cultural practices were carried, preserved, and adapted by descendants of enslaved people.
Regrettably, I have not seen either film in its full preserved form. Like many of you reading this, I’ve only had access to low-resolution, incomplete, often without subtitles, and possibly re-edited versions circulating online. One must question the legitimacy of these unauthorized uploads, and I certainly don’t intend to promote piracy.
What I can say is that the fictional feature, set and filmed in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Bahia, follows a Nigerian man sent to Brazil to trace the descendants of an ancestor taken during the slave trade. The story shifts between 18th-century Brazil and 1970s Nigeria. It uses spiritual possession and a love story that crosses centuries to connect the two timelines, as scenes from past and present are intercut to show that the legacy of slavery and Yoruba belief systems are still active and personal.
The documentary short, made two decades later, captures a Candomblé ceremony in Salvador, Bahia. It observes how the veneration of Yoruba deities (orixás), who are believed to influence aspects of nature and human life, continues within Afro-Brazilian communities, as a living spiritual tradition that has survived slavery and colonization.
At the risk of flattening complex histories, what made the earlier collaboration possible wasn’t a treaty. It was a convergence of factors. “Black Goddess” was backed in part by Embrafilme, Brazil’s national film agency at the time. On the Nigerian side, the post-Biafra government was expanding its diplomatic and cultural presence abroad, including via state-backed artistic initiatives.
Balogun’s own position—he has spoken of his maternal family’s origins among Brazilian returnees who settled in Lagos in the 19th century—placed him in proximity to both Yoruba and Afro-Brazilian cultural spaces. His great-grandfather, he has noted in past publications, came back from Brazil to Nigeria as part of that returnee movement, known locally as the Aguda community.
Ultimately, the result was a film that, structurally speaking, prefigured much of what today’s treaty now will attempt to formalize. Subsequently, if “Black Goddess” footage is hard to access today, and if both films themselves haven’t been widely preserved and circulated, that doesn’t erase what they accomplished, even if the efforts were not formalized under national agreements and sustained.
After speaking directly with Filmkollektiv Frankfurt (Germany)—an independent curation and preservation group that staged one of the very few known retrospectives of Balogun’s work in 2015—I confirmed that surviving film prints are housed at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, France. “Black Goddess” is among them. But there are legal, logistical, and institutional constraints that make circulation difficult. In that way, these films are real and available, but inaccessible to the general public.
I’ve also been in contact with people who have professional relationships that could bring me closer to Balogun himself. He is still alive and occasionally active, writing, appearing on Nigerian television, and I hope to speak with him directly.
By the way, he’ll be 80 years old in August.
As an aside, I’m keeping an eye on Nigerian filmmaker CJ Obasi’s follow-up to “Mami Wata,” titled “La Pyramide.” The Brazil-Nigeria-Senegal-UK-US co-production is still in development, and while details remain limited, Obasi has said it will continue exploring themes from his Sundance-winning film, and that part of it will be set in Salvador, Bahia.
In the end, the value in returning to Balogun’s “Black Goddess” (and “Gods of Africa in Brazil”) is to acknowledge how fragile the conditions were that allowed them to exist. No treaty backed them. No permanent pipeline followed them. They were the product of rare access, temporary alignment, and personal initiative. If today’s agreements don’t account for the uneven ground Balogun had to navigate, and haven’t resolved the problems that kept his work from being preserved and circulated, then the infrastructure still isn’t there.
In my exchange with Filmkollektiv Frankfurt, as in other conversations I’ve had with archives, universities, and cultural institutions across Europe and North America in recent years, I’ve often been told—sometimes directly—that public interest plays a major role in what gets restored and made available. Films outside the recognized canon, especially from African filmmakers who aren’t widely known, tend to receive less attention.
The suggestion, even if not always explicitly stated, is that renewed interest could help create the momentum needed for restoration and public re-release. That possibility is a reminder that visibility still matters. If the industry wants to build on what came before, then this history, not just our memory of it, has to be made available again.
As I wrote when Souleymane Cissé, another African cinema trailblazer, passed away earlier this year at 84, to truly honor his legacy is to understand his body of work as an ongoing dialogue with Africa’s past, present, and future. But perhaps, most urgently, we must cherish and exalt him as a living archive while we still can.
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