There is a question that runs underneath every film in this AMVCA category, and it is not really about language. It is about memory. About what gets passed down and what gets lost. About who controls the telling.
The Best Indigenous Language West Africa category at the 12th annual Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards is not simply a celebration of Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa on screen; it is a reckoning with what those languages carry inside them, and what cinema can do when it refuses to translate itself for anyone.
This year's five nominees make that argument in five completely different registers. Together, they form a portrait of West African storytelling at a particular crossroads; ambitious, uneven in places, and vital in all of them.
The Epic Tradition, Redefined
The two Yoruba-language epics in this category arrive from very different sensibilities, but both are asking the same question: what does it mean to recover a hero?
Lisabi: A Legend Is Born, directed by Niyi Akinmolayan and produced by Lateef Adedimeji and his wife Adebimpe Oyebade, is the second chapter in an ambitious two-part retelling of the story of Lísàbí Agbongbo-Akala, the Egba farmer-warrior who led his people to resist the oppressive reach of the Oyo Empire in the 18th century. The film premiered at the John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History in Onikan, a choice that was itself a statement.
This was not a film seeking red-carpet spectacle. It was a film looking for roots. Adedimeji, in the buildup to the premiere, spoke with the clarity of someone doing more than making a movie: the heroes of this continent have been forgotten, he said, while foreign ones are embraced.
This is how you reclaim.
The spiritual register of the film, the Yoruba gods guiding warriors in battle, the traditional chants threading through the sound design, the meticulous Egba dialect work, all of it points to a production that understood the weight of what it was carrying.
Labake Olododo, directed by Biodun Stephen and produced by Iyabo Ojo in her big screen producing debut, takes the epic to a different place entirely. Set in the fictional ancient Yoruba village of Lukosi, the film centres on Labake, a female warlord navigating the politics of power, love, and betrayal in a world that has its own rules about what women are permitted to be.
Critics have rightly noted that the film does not labour to explain or justify its heroine. Labake simply is. Fierce, contradictory, capable of war and vulnerability in the same breath. In a genre that can sometimes feel crowded and formulaic, that restraint is its own kind of statement. The film grossed over 249 million Naira at the Nigerian box office, proof that Yoruba-language cinema, when it is made with this level of commitment, still commands a genuine audience.
The Question at the Edges
Then there is Aljana, and it arrives from a place most of this year's category has not yet visited.
Grace Yachat Yakubu's debut narrative feature is set in a remote Northern Nigerian village where a young girl defies her community to save a boy condemned as spiritually cursed. The film, produced under Yakubu's Gold One Studios and shaped by her years of documentary work telling the stories of Arewa women, is Hausa-language cinema operating with a different set of priorities. Where the Yoruba epics reach back into history, Aljana reaches inward, into the quiet violence of communities that punish what they cannot understand: children who are different, or faith weaponised against the vulnerable.
The weight of unspoken rules. Yakubu, who studied at the University of the Arts London and came to filmmaking through photography and documentary production, has described the film's horror as not loud or grotesque but quiet, living in looks, in rituals, in the heaviness of what is never said aloud. That Northern Nigerian perspective, told from inside with this level of specificity, is genuinely rare on a stage like this. Its presence here matters.
Inheritance and Its Costs
The Serpent's Gift, produced by Winifred Mena-Ajakpovi and directed by Kayode Kasum, operates in yet another register. A slow-burning, Igbo-steeped psychological thriller in which a young widow inherits her powerful husband's empire and finds herself at the centre of a war that is as much spiritual as it is material. The film earned nominations at the Septimius Awards in Amsterdam before its West African cinema release, the kind of global recognition that signals Nollywood's reach is genuinely widening. Mena-Ajakpovi, known for her female-centred, layered productions, and Kasum, whose work consistently interrogates African tradition with a cinematic eye, make for a partnership that gives the film both its cultural depth and its emotional velocity.
A Devotion Reclaimed
And then, completing this five-strong conversation, is Olorisha by Abiola Adeshina, the most quietly ambitious film in the category. In Yoruba cosmology, an Olorisha has devoted themselves to the Orisha, the divine intermediaries between the human world and the supreme. A film named for that devotion is not a casual gesture. It is a film willing to enter a conversation about faith, tradition, and identity that mainstream Nollywood still often approaches with caution or leaves entirely untouched.
What This Category Is Really Saying
Read together, these five films are not simply displaying linguistic diversity. They are doing something more urgent, insisting that the inside of these cultures is worth cinematic attention on its own terms, without softening, without subtitling the soul of it for an audience that might be unfamiliar.
A warrior queen who does not need to justify her existence. A farmer-hero reclaimed from the margins of colonial history. A Northern girl challenging the machinery of religious terror. A widow navigating the spiritual and material weight of inheritance. A devotion, named and honoured.
West African storytelling has never been short of material. What this category represents is filmmakers who have decided, with increasing seriousness and craft, that the material deserves the full force of the screen.
AMVCA 12 is proudly brought to you by Don Julio. Voting is open and closes on April 26th. Vote for your favourite nominee here.