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When Serge Noukoué and Nadira Shakur launched NollywoodWeek in 2013, they weren’t chasing trends. They were filling a void. Shakur, originally from Washington, D.C., is an African American who has lived in France and across Africa. Noukoué was born and raised in Paris, but his family is from Benin. That dynamic — an American with roots in the diaspora and a French-born African with deep ties to the continent — would come to define the festival’s perspective from day one.
“There was this huge disconnect between the cultural appetite of African diasporic audiences in France and what the cinemas were actually offering,” said Shakur. “We felt like it was really lacking, like we were being ignored, and not subtly.”
That gap — between expectation and access, between relevance and representation — became the festival’s reason to exist. What began as a pop-up screening initiative evolved into a full-scale annual event. Now, entering its twelfth edition, NollywoodWeek returns to Cinéma l’Arlequin in Paris from May 7–11, 2025. The program includes feature films from Nigeria, shorts from Kenya, Cameroon, Benin, the United States, and a series of panels, masterclasses, and networking events. But this year’s edition arrives with a noticeable shift in tone: one that’s reflective, strategic, and future-facing.
“We’re in a period of reevaluation,” said Noukoué. “The industry has changed. Streaming changed it. COVID changed it. The audience has changed. So now the question is, what does NollywoodWeek even mean?”
The two met in 2006 at a UNESCO event on Nollywood held in Paris. “We were both in the audience,” said Shakur. “And we both stood up to ask basically the same question, but from different angles.” Shakur, coming from the U.S. with a diasporic perspective, asked how African cinema could build stronger bridges to global Black audiences. Noukoué, representing a Francophone view, pushed on language accessibility and subtitling. “We didn’t even know each other,” she said, “but it was obvious we were thinking about the same things.”
Their collaboration started informally — screenings, discussions, translation efforts — but eventually coalesced into something larger. “The festival came out of that frustration,” said Noukoué. “There were a lot of one-off events and token screenings, but nothing consistent. Nothing that treated this work like it actually mattered.”
They knew calling it NollywoodWeek would be provocative.
“At that time, a lot of people in France didn’t even think of Nollywood as cinema,” said Shakur. “If anything, it was seen as a curiosity — low-budget, unserious, not worthy of a ‘real’ film event. So we leaned into it. We said, no, this is exactly what we’re doing.”
Noukoué put it more bluntly: “We were told by theater managers, straight up, that Black people don’t go to the movies. That Africans don’t buy tickets. They’d say, ‘What proof do you have that there’s an audience for this?’”
The resistance wasn’t just institutional, it was philosophical. “People would ask why we didn’t just do a general African film festival,” said Shakur. “But there were already plenty of festivals like that — most of them run by people who weren’t of the continent, showcasing Africa from the outside. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to go deep, not broad.”
From the beginning, the goal was to create a premium experience, without relying on the traditional French funding system. “We made a decision early on not to go the CNC route,” said Noukoué. “The bureaucracy is insane. You apply, wait six months, maybe you hear back, maybe you don’t. We couldn’t build anything sustainable that way. So we started with private sponsorship and community partnerships.”
And they applied the same mindset to how the festival looked and felt. “The branding was very intentional,” said Shakur. “We weren’t going to do it in a community center. We chose a proper cinema. We printed real materials. We paid for things that people don’t expect a Black film festival to pay for, because we wanted the perception to change.”
Over time, it did. They’ve now subtitled more than 170 films into French — a massive labor investment that made the work accessible to an entirely different audience. “Subtitling isn’t glamorous,” said Shakur. “But it’s foundational. You can’t build a cross-continental audience without it.”
“We were bridging two worlds,” said Noukoué. “Francophone and Anglophone, diaspora and continent, indie and commercial. It wasn’t about one vision of African cinema. It was about building a space where all those visions could sit next to each other.”
That space, however, has always had to justify itself. “There were Nigerian filmmakers who wouldn’t submit to us because they didn’t want the ‘Nollywood’ label on their work,” said Shakur. “They thought it would hurt their chances of getting into certain festivals. And I get it. The stigma is real.”
“But those same filmmakers started coming back,” said Noukoué. “Because they saw the work. They saw the quality. They saw that we weren’t just screening anything. We were curating a platform.”
“We took a bet on the brand,” he added. “And we’ve spent a decade reshaping what it means. That bet paid off. We made Nollywood visible in spaces where it had been dismissed, and we did it without softening or apologizing for what it was.”
The 2025 edition reflects that evolution. Nigerian titles still form the backbone — including “Out in the Darkness,” “Blackout,” and “The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos” — but the lineup is more geographically diverse than in years past. Feature films like “The Dog” (Kenya/Sweden), “Sierra’s Gold” (South Africa), and “Soft Love” (Nigeria/South Africa) broaden the festival’s continental reach. These sit alongside a varied slate of shorts from Kenya (“1992”), Cameroon (“AYO”), Benin (“Noces d’Eau”), and the United States (“Obodo Oyibo”), reflecting the wider network of filmmakers Nollywood has influenced.
Guests this year include directors Biodun Stephen and Adekunle “Nodash” Adejuyigbe, actors Meg Otanwa and Bikiya Graham-Douglas, and producers and critics from across the diaspora. “It’s become this sort of reunion zone,” said Shakur. “People from London, Lagos, Nairobi, Atlanta, they all show up, and suddenly it’s like, oh, that person’s work changed my career, and now we’re on the same panel.”
But visibility isn’t the endpoint. Both founders are looking ahead to something more formal — something structural. “We’re exploring a market component,” said Noukoué. “A real marketplace. A space for buyers, producers, streamers, funders, and creatives to actually sit at the table.”
He’s careful not to overpromise. “We’re watching other models,” he said. “We’re not trying to copy Cannes. We’re trying to respond to what the Black screen community actually needs — especially in Europe.”
“We’re thinking about how to build a market that reflects how we actually work,” said Shakur.
She’s clear-eyed about the obstacles. “It’s not easy,” she said. “Especially with funding. COVID knocked a lot of our support out — Air France, for example. And some years we really didn’t know if we’d make it to the next edition.”
“But we made it anyway,” said Noukoué. “Even if it meant scaling back, even if it meant doing everything ourselves, we made it happen. Because we’re not building this just to say we did it. We’re building it so it can last.”
That’s why they still subtitle every film. Why they fly filmmakers in when they can. Why they keep printing programs. “It might sound old-school,” said Shakur, “but there’s still value in people showing up, in being in the same room.”
It’s a belief they’ve held since the beginning: that cinema isn’t just what’s on screen, but what happens around it. “You can’t build an ecosystem from a laptop,” said Noukoué. “You need collisions. You need proximity. That’s what a festival gives you.”
And that’s why Paris matters. “There’s something symbolic about doing this here,” said Shakur. “This is a city that’s long excluded African filmmakers — or only included them on terms defined by someone else. To be here, every year, with our own space, our own timeline, our own decisions — that means something.”
NollywoodWeek was built to be intentional — and to last. Year by year, edition by edition, it’s become more than a showcase. It’s become a strategy. A meeting point. A kind of roadmap for what’s possible when African cinema isn’t simply invited in, but defines the room itself.
And on May 7, it begins again.
The 12th edition of NollywoodWeek takes place May 7–11, 2025, at Cinéma l’Arlequin in Paris. Akoroko and Nigeria partner, What Kept Me Up, will be on the ground covering the festival under the African Film Press (AFP) banner.