Nduka Ebube Dike did not set out to write a film about Nollywood. Dear Dija, his first produced screenplay, follows two teenagers who fall in love across a balcony while bonding over Nollywood films. The original story came from Eke Eleanya Urum, while Ifeoma Chukwuogo directed the 28-minute short, which is available on YouTube.
Dike is not a career screenwriter. He studied engineering and worked as a copywriter for brands including Hero Lager, Uber and Fidelity Bank. He is now Creative Director at Risevest. He has also written short stories and satire, and that background shows in Dear Dija. The dialogue is lean and precise, with little room for excess.
The story follows Nnamdi, an Igbo boy, and Khadija, a Muslim girl who live in neighbouring flats. They talk across a balcony. They do not touch or kiss. Instead, they trade Nollywood films the way other teenagers might trade songs.
Nnamdi prefers older Nollywood films, while Khadija likes newer titles. The film references four films by name: Mr. Ibu by Andy Chukwu, A Million Tears by Tchidi Chikere, The Wedding Party by Kemi Adetiba and Isoken by Jade Osiberu. Two belong to the older Nollywood era and two to the newer one.
Dike drew on his own childhood for the setting, “It was inspired by my own house,” he tells The Nollywood Reporter. “My childhood, and their love for movies specifically, are things I borrowed from my own life.”
He lived in that house in Aba for 23 years before moving to Lagos, “Those kinds of houses we grew up in, in Aba, are built back to back. You see that kind of architecture all over Nigeria.”The balconies in the film are therefore more than a plot device. They are part of Dike’s memory.
The film also sits inside a real tension. Nnamdi is Igbo and Christian. Khadija is Hausa and Muslim. Their parents do not see a young love story. They see differences and potential trouble.
“I know that there’ll be tension,” he says. “But we don’t have to scream it out loud. To maintain that tenderness, I wanted the audience to feel a lot, so I didn’t want the parents to steal the attention away from that.”
The tension appears in the way the parents look at each other and in the way Khadija’s mother calls her inside.
Dike remembered a brief period when some of his neighbours were Hausa.
“There were these four Hausa men in the compound. They’d just come out and teach me and my sister words in Hausa. It was fun.”
That memory shaped how he wrote Khadija’s family. He did not want to present them as outsiders.
“For me, it wasn’t specifically about their differences. What drove the story for me was more their humanity, the small things they said and did. I don’t think they ever saw each other as different people. They’re just parents doing things a bit differently.”
Dike also recalled a childhood memory that shaped the film’s emotional core: the 2002 riots that reached Aba, followed by retaliatory violence in the city.
For Dike, growing up in a Nigerian city meant growing up alongside people who were different from him and learning to see them as neighbours first. That perspective informs Dear Dija: two teenagers find themselves in a world that tells them to stay apart, but they keep talking anyway.
There is a moment where Nnamdi is pushed down and nothing happens. There is no police intervention or immediate consequence. Dike says the silence was intentional.
“I was talking with Eleanya about whether we should carry it further, and I was like, ‘That’s too dramatic,’” he says. “I think that much drama would ruin the story. We want this to stay cute and beautiful.”
The film has drama, but it remains restrained. Dike wanted the story to stay tender rather than build towards a confrontation between the families.
The choice to have Nnamdi and Khadija bond over Nollywood classics was also deliberate.
“I’m just using the movies as a statement,” Dike says. “We have a lot to draw on in Nollywood. It’s not really about self-referencing the ecosystem.”
The references give the teenagers a shared language. When they argue about which Nollywood film is better, they are talking about something familiar to both of them.
Dike worked with director Ifeoma Chukwuogo, who had already directed Bariga Sugar.
“I think she’s a fantastic director,” he says. “She brought the world that I was imagining to life with so much care. I felt as if she’d written it herself. She understood so much about the world I was building.”
Dike was working a full-time job during production and could not be on set as much as he wanted.
“I ended up not being as involved in most of that process as I wanted to be,” he admits.
But he trusted Chukwuogo.
“She never let it slip. She’s fantastic.”
The performances carry much of the film’s restraint. The leads keep their distance for almost the entire runtime. They stand a few feet apart and talk across railings, never closing the gap until the end, when they finally hug.
That moment works because of the distance that precedes it. Dike’s background outside screenwriting also shaped the film.
“This is just me talking, I haven’t really sat down and analysed my own work, but I think a lot of it comes from my background in copywriting,” he says. “Copywriting is essentially about writing exactly what you want to say, without wasting words. I’m used to working with tight word counts, so cutting dialogue down to what’s essential comes naturally to me.”
That discipline is visible in the film’s dialogue. Most exchanges are brief, with little room for unnecessary explanation.
When asked about the possibility of a sequel, Dike is uncertain.
“As for Nnamdi and Dija, I don’t know. I feel like they’re two people whose story has run its course.”
He does not see them as characters who would necessarily appear in other projects.
“Sometimes you meet someone and you never meet again, and no matter how much you liked them, that’s just life. There’s no closure, and that’s fine.”
Dike is already working on something new. He describes it as daunting.
“It feels really big, the scale of what I’m trying to do this time,” he says.