‘When Nigeria Happens’ Locarno Review: An Uneven but Captivating Dance Through Lagos Life

When Nigeria Happens, directed by Ema Edosio, is a quietly profound cinematic dance, one that revels in its own spectacle while never repressing its yearning for sincerity. The film stretches, in its own identity, the definitions of what a dance and music film can be. Rather than filling in the gaps with musical numbers of fantastical expressions, it channels its power through movement, rhythm, and the contortions of the human spirit.

The story follows a troupe of misfit dancers – Pocco, Lighter, Movement, Colos, and Poppy – led by their fearless frontman, Fagbo, who quotes Kwame Nkrumah as he guides them into building a future amid the chaotic and unfiltered slavery of modern Lagos. Their world, embellished and vibrant, where emaciated horses are ridden by potbellied children and almost overflowing with youthful exuberance, is shattered when Fagbo’s mother falls critically ill, forcing him to choose between his artistic ambitions and familial duty.

Titled after the popular Nigerian phrase that captures the inevitability of life’s predicaments, When Nigeria Happens presents an inescapable reality that eventually catches up with everyone in Nigeria. For Fagbo, even the moral high ground of his artistic pursuits cannot shield him. Nigeria soon happens to him as his life spirals from hospital beds to a prison cell, with each chance at survival demanding compromises that expose the harsh realities of making a living in Nigeria.

Edosio’s vision shines with a comforting, albeit naked, adhesion to realism, choosing to neither shy away from the unique narrative decisions that give the film its one-of-a-kind feel nor rest the full shine of her world in the middle of the lucid realities around the characters. The absurdity in costumes, mannerisms, and tone of the film’s central core is as surprising to the audience as it is to the other characters of the film; that elevates both the exclusivity in her handling of the subject matter and the depth of the final scene of the film when the individualism is eaten up by the world the film exists in.

Visually, When Nigeria Happens is a dance in itself of the contrasting divide between freedom and everything working against it. In theater-looking set locations, when the group is at home, the characters get to squeeze into their truest forms for the emotional heartbeat of the story, while the outside is perforated with the clusters of impoverished people and the desolations they exist inside. The camera is a weary witness. Where conventional music and dance films would choose to say in rhyming words the summaries of the heart out loud, with no lyrics to their choreography, this film is stitched together with the groans and frustrations in dance that can’t quite be captured with words.

That said, the film’s unconventional rhythm, partly because of being dance-oriented and also because of being too immobile, may not cater to all tastes. Its pace is deliberate and its narrative fragmented, and by the end, the pieces it encompasses come to a rather harmonious end. Yet one can’t help but feel there is a lot of wasted fodder within its two-hour runtime. For starters, despite its best intention to center the film around Fagbo, a lot of his story includes running around aimlessly without a sense of endearing purpose. A sick missing mother, his love interest, his ambition in the face of opportunity, and his relationship with his father come and go almost unchoreographed and at times in juxtaposition to each other, exploring the world of the man without ever digging into the makings of the man himself.

There’s also a lot of room to explore the other characters with more depth, if not for anything else, to give the central character peripheral grounding rather than reducing them to shadows hovering around Fagbo. His family, his group, and everyone he comes into contact with are reduced to single stationary characters for him to bounce around, yet only one character – his love interest Pocco – ever changes by the end. This change, though pivotal in driving the film to its climax, is thrown in almost out of nowhere. And Ruth El Phygo Felix’s endearing performance, which adds the most important dimension to the story’s central plight, doesn’t arrive until the final ten minutes of the film.

The result is a film that, if tallied by the sum of its best parts, feels in spirit perhaps just as resonant as a stage musical such as Les Misérables or an anti-musical such as Dancer in the Dark. This is true only if the middle act of the film doesn’t lose its footing as it ultimately does. But with the language, the sonority in its set designs and stylistic intentionality, and the heavy personal questions it raises about freedom and individuality in a world bred for conformity, When Nigeria Happens is nothing short of impressive.

When Nigeria Happens was the opening film in the inaugural Africa-focused Open Doors section at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival.

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