52 Films by Women Vol 10. 42. LADY (Director: Olive Nwosu)

 

Pictured: Lady (Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah) drives a group of prostitutes to their next appointment in a scene from the Lagos-set drama, 'Lady', written and directed by Olive Nwosu. Photo: Peter Okesun / Film Four (UK)

Buoyed by sentiment rather than authenticity, Lady is a genre film that really ought to be a realistic drama. The Lagos-born, US trained writer-director Olive Nwosu has been steered towards choices that rob her debut feature film of grit and substance. The cast acquit themselves well, but this is a film where you never once enter the title character’s head. Nwosu privileges positive representation over truth and the result is two-dimensional. You can enjoy the images. Emotionally, you are frozen out.

Set in Lagos, it tells the story of woman taxi driver Lady (newcomer Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah) who has been traumatised by her mother’s struggle to survive. Asked how she managed to afford her car, or rather who did she have sex with, Lady doesn’t answer. Her day-to-day existence is interrupted by the Nigerian Government’s decision to withdraw fuel subsidies for its citizens – a measure taken ostensibly to address the country’s mounting debt, though you wouldn’t know that from the film – as well as by the re-appearance of her former best friend, Pinky (Amanda Oruh), whom Lady hasn’t seen for five years. Pinky reminds Lady of her ambition – to migrate to Freetown, the town of her mother’s birth. Lady doesn’t have the resources to follow through. She visits – and partly cares for – Iya (Binta Ayo Mogaji), the woman who took care of both Pinky and Lady when they were children. The pair pledged to be best friends forever, only for Pinky to suddenly disappear. ‘I was hoping not to find you,’ Pinky confesses, superficially disappointed that Lady has not left Lagos. She has a proposition, but first it’s a case of ‘show, don’t tell’.

Lady discovers that the beautiful and confident Pinky works as a prostitute. Her boss needs a driver. Would Lady be interested? Certainly, Lady doesn’t fit in with the community of male taxi drivers, who moan that they left the house not to listen to women, why should they do so at work? Although fuel prices are threatening to increase, Lady doesn’t want to join the male drivers in a protest. In the best staged scene in the film, she meets Pinky’s boss. Nwosu has him address Lady as the camera pans (in close medium shot) around the men at the table, emphasising the oppressive male atmosphere far more effectively than a conventional establishing medium shot. Lady smashes a glass and stands her ground. We see the fear in her eyes, but she isn’t about to be intimidated. Ujah’s eyes widen to such an extent, several blood vessels appear burst. Impressed, the boss agrees a rate: 40,000 each time Lady drives.

Up until this point, the film’s genre intentions aren’t clear. There is a nice scene where Lady haggles with a young boy selling roasted nuts to drivers in a traffic jam. She gets him to reduce his price from 500 to 250 Naira a bag and then tells him to keep the change. The second bag is for Iya. She and Lady enjoy them in front of the television. There is also a montage of Lady’s passengers in the back seat, Lady occupying the bottom right-hand side of the frame while the rest of the frame changes. Nwosu also shows Lady making an emergency toilet stop, another signifier of realist intentions.

The prostitutes who fill Lady’s car, in particular, Sugar (Tinuade Jemiseye), assert themselves, asking whether Lady has had sex. Lady’s refusal to engage with the question leads them to label her a virgin. Nwosu gives us flashbacks to a sexual act in the back seat of a car. We conclude that not only did Lady witness her mother having sex – hinted at in the opening and later shown – but she may have been assaulted herself.

Lady refuses to enter the house where Pinky and her colleagues entertain, but on her first night out, she is moved on. We see Lady drive around the city, but not whether she collects the women four hours later as agreed. This editorial decision reduces the sense of Lady as a viewpoint character. We expect to experience her emotions with her, but Nwosu cuts to the next day, trading empathy for plot.

Lady keeps her new job. Her male boss is never shown again. One of the girls attempts to tell her what happened to her predecessor, Senator, but Lady closes down the conversation.

In one scene, Lady stands in her room, baseball cap with a curse word on her head, and starts rapping. Nwosu shows us that her protagonist fiercely guards her independence and may possibly have recording ambitions. She and other drivers listen to DJ Revolution (Seun Kuti, son of Afrobeat pioneer, Fela Kuti), who updates his audience with statements outlining the Nigerian Government’s corruption.

‘Africa, continent for sale’ is a sentiment heard on the soundtrack. The girls reveal the places they would like to live in: Sweden, France, New York. Pinky betrays Lady’s confidence by mentioning Freetown. ‘Why would you move in Africa?’ Lady is asked. Pinky gives the answer. The disclosure widens the rift between the two former friends.

‘If a man tried to touch me, I would kill him,’ Lady explains. This assertion is tested after Lady accumulates the 400,000 naira needed to travel to Freetown, when, having agreed to park her car inside a compound where a party is taking place, she hears screaming. Lady misinterprets a situation. The incident firmly situates the film in genre territory. There’s more. Pinky reveals that she is pregnant with Senator’s child. The driver was apparently murdered.

Nwosu steers us towards a conclusion but then shows us how inflation finally impacts on Lady’s life. A choice is made, and after ninety minutes of taking her windscreen sticker’s advice to, ‘Sing Your Own Song’, Lady finally shows solidarity with the protest movement.

Are murders so easily covered up in Lagos? For the purpose of Nwosu’s plot, they are. There is scant nuance in her storytelling. Men are exploitative. Towards the end, Lady wanders around a mansion and sees the women at work. They see her too.

The Federal Government of Nigeria did not contribute to the production of Nwosu’s film, which instead had support from Britain’s Film Four and Screen Scotland, together with the Sundance Institute. The film won Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic special jury award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, akin to the Institute marking its homework. Some of the images stand out, such as Lady washing Iya’s hair outdoors while traffic flows on a motorway bridge over the river. The upside-down view of the river that opens the film comes across as a ‘do not’ affectation for novice filmmakers to avoid; Nwosu does not give us an upside-down view of life in Lagos that the shot promises.

Reviewed at Screen Four, Picturehouse Central, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, Tuesday 6^th October 2026, 12:30pm Press & Industry screening

Pictured: Poster art for the film, 'Lady'. Courtesy of Film Four (UK)