Nollyween: Christian Chika Onu’s Karishika, with Seek & Find

Dubem Aniebonam is a Nigerian-American artist and architectural designer living in New York City. Her minimalist, geometric artwork is inspired by traditional African symbolic art and writing as well as her education in fine art and architecture. Her connection to Nollywood films began in her childhood, with nostalgic memories of listening through her bedroom floor way past bedtime as her parents enjoyed loud, dramatic, and entertaining Nollywood films late into the night. She grew up watching these films with her family and adored the immense creativity and has always been excited to share these films with friends. Within the last few years she’s been revisiting the hundreds of video tapes living in the basement of her childhood home, recognizing the greatness of Nollywood that needs to be shared throughout the world. She’s excited to work with Seek & Find to restore and bring the greatness of vintage Nollywood to the American stage, to share it with the limelight of a larger international audience.

Roger Blanc is a filmmaker and film archivist who has been working in both industries for nearly a decade. His artistic sensibilities verge on the abstract and avant garde, and his archival specialty is in VHS restoration. When his partner, Dubem, and her siblings introduced him to the wonderful world of Nollywood, he realized the opportunity therein: the opportunity to preserve an often overlooked yet gargantuan cinematic history by performing some of the first restorations of some of Nollywood’s classics. Together with Dubem, the two took it upon themselves to transition Seek & Find into the film restoration endeavor it is today.

Dr. Christian Chika Onu is a seasoned and legendary film director, writer, and actor who set the groundwork for Nollywood’s Golden Age (1990s–2000s) and wrote one of the most definitive books on the subject, The Unusual Story of The Early Years of Nollywood. As a pioneer of the movement, he has won numerous awards for his work and has a directorial oeuvre of over 300 films, with Karishika being one of his most beloved and most feared. His work has captured the hearts and minds of Nigerians for decades and he is considered an international icon of Nigerian cinema.

AMICHI is a production project and collaboration between musicians and collectors, Amit and Chi-chi Barua. The couple, now based in Brooklyn, NY, fuses their palate together with sounds spanning careers working in the background at recording studios around the city. Their sets are rooted in bass and kick heavy tracks, flirting with futuristic themes and tribal rhythms to craft meaningful sets for anyone looking for an escape on the dance floor. Their online radio show, AMICHI Time, offers a more intimate look into their soundscape, consistently highlighting soulful, intimate, and psychedelic music to make their listeners feel held and connected.

The African Film Institute aims to create a home and a place of intimacy with African cinema in New York, through developing gradually and organically a viewing program animated by fellowships; a growing library; an active writers’ room; and an expanding catalog of recorded dialogs. The African Film Institute draws from the visual cultures that view cinema as an evening school: a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination—employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods informed by different uses of time, visual and textual histories, and social struggles and hopes in mutuality between their own locality and the world at large. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room.

Christian Nyampeta is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher living in New York, and working in London, the Netherlands, and Rwanda where he convenes the Nyanza Working Group of the Another Roadmap African Cluster (ARAC). In New York Nyampeta sits on the Board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and he is on the board of November magazine. Nyampeta holds a PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths completed under the supervision of Kodwo Eshun, following the examination of Leela Gandhi and Denise Ferreira da Silva.