Abdulafiz Opeyemi Shittu, an emerging documentary filmmaker, is steadily creating a niche for himself as a cultural archivist, working at the intersection of memory, tradition and contemporary storytelling. He has turned his lenses on Yoruba culture, spotlighting key aspects of food and entertainment traditions.
His journey began with Dòdò Ìkìrẹ̀, a short documentary addressing local agrifood system challenges, which was one of the only two African films selected for the 2025 edition of the World Food Forum (WFF) Youth Film Festival, the second being Hidden Hunger, directed by Orit Novak. Both films represented West Africa and East Africa respectively, earning nominations in the Best Focus on Women in Agrifood Systems category in the festival which occurred at the headquarters of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome, Italy.
In Dòdò Ìkìrẹ̀, Shittu spotlights the eponymous plantain snack that is commonly associated with Yoruba people, whose art and business is disputed to have originated from either Ikire or Apomu: two towns in Osun state. Produced, directed and shot by Shittu himself, the documentary borders on the lived realities behind the seemingly modest business together with the resilient women behind its sustenance.
The filmmaker’s efforts here, though brief, are marked by an observational intimacy and palpable commitment to protecting overlooked and endangered cultural practices from slipping into oblivion.
Shittu’s passion and vision comes from a deep-seated concern about the uneven documentation of African cultures when compared to Western societies where the early and massive adoption of digital technology has made cultural histories more widely archived and accessible. Drawing from his Yoruba heritage, he realizes the gaps left by oral traditions, mechanisms through which stories have often been either totally lost or altered as they are passed down from one generation to another. To fill up these gaps, Shittu takes matters into his own hands.
His forthcoming feature-length documentary, Rhythm of The Ancestors: Yoruba Bàtá, produced with Ifedayo Afolayan, strengthens his archival mission by exploring the historical and spiritual significance of the bàtá drum and dance generally in Yorubaland and the diaspora.
With an almost two-hour runtime, the film expands beyond the compact scale of his earlier work, diving into a tradition that dates back to centuries of existence of the Yoruba people and has now become a site of transnational cultural exchange. Shittu’s oeuvre also includes Grief (2025), a documentary about loss and the path to healing, which made official selections for Ibadan Indie Film Awards, Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival (ENIFF) and The Annual Film Mischief the same year.
In an interview with The Nollywood Reporter, Shittu reflects on his creative process and his enduring commitment to culturally rooted storytelling.
TNR: What inspired you to start documenting Yoruba culture through film, and how did your journey begin?
Shittu: From Nigeria, I can tell a lot about American culture because it is quite accessible online. You can know the deepest things in America that are happening culture-wise, in hip-hop and even their designers, how they combine clothes. You can tell why people wear certain kinds of clothes.
However, for Nigeria and for most of our cultures here, a lot remains undocumented. You can barely tell what is happening in the next state. I just took it upon myself to document these aspects of our cultures that people take for granted. They still need to be documented for a wider audience.
When I did it with Dòdò ìkìrẹ̀, I realized that a lot of people do not even know what is happening or how the dòdò is made. Everybody was just flying around with rumors, so I decided to amplify the truth instead. That is also what motivated me to work on bàtá.
How does your personal connection to Yoruba heritage influence the way you tell these stories?
I’m really curious about a lot of things, and I try to understand my roots. It’s just being inquisitive like an actual youth that is trying to participate in what is happening around them. Culture is a way of life. How can I live that life fully if I don’t understand my heritage and my culture? That is exactly what I’m trying to do, and that’s why it has an influence on the way that I tell my story.
Your documentary Dòdò Ìkìrẹ̀ is celebrated for capturing a slice of Yoruba food tradition and life. What was the most challenging part of telling this story?
Sincerely, the most challenging part of telling the story is that after I traveled to the town to work on it, and gathered all my resources, it still felt like it wasn’t enough. I thought it had to be on a grand scale. What I saw and what I had shot made it feel like this big industry was just run by a couple of people who hadn’t even made it into a factory.
You know, if you want to talk about something as common as pure water or something that has been around for ages, you’d think by now there would be a big facility where they make it all. But I found out that it’s just a few resilient women who have turned this agribusiness into a daily life. Even though they don’t make much every day, they’ve made it a culture, a personal thing to keep the name of their town afloat through the business.
Most of the people who actually work or make these snacks are no longer in business, because they can’t afford to fund it. We had to scout around before we even found someone still active in the business. I think that’s the most challenging part.
In retrospect, what key lessons or insights did you gain from creating Dòdò Ìkìrẹ̀ that has shaped your approach to filmmaking?
The key insight I got from Dòdò Ìkìrẹ̀ that has shaped my approach to filmmaking is for me to be in the moment. Like I said, when I worked on it, I felt like my materials were not enough. I didn’t fully understand that it’s not always about how the filmmaker wants the story to be. Sometimes, the story just comes the way it is, and it’s for me to guide it. I can’t really create what is not there.
It was after I made Dòdò Ìkìrẹ̀ that I realized the chain of the business: from the people who sell the banana to those who make the snacks and those who hawk it, were actually women. That was not something I noticed while I was filming. The insight for me is that there are some structures you cannot change. The story already has them, and you are just to follow as a filmmaker. There is always a structure in the story that you cannot effectively change because nature has made it that way.
Regarding your forthcoming documentary Rhythm of The Ancestors: Yoruba Bàtá, what can audiences expect, and why is it significant for Yoruba cultural preservation?
I want the audience to expect shocking revelations and proper education on what bàtá is. We hear bàtá almost all the time in music, especially in Afrobeats, but a lot of people don’t know where it comes from.
If you’ve listened to Asake or even watched stage performances by Burna Boy, you’ve heard bàtá countless times. I want people to hear that and remember the name Làgbájà, and realize that, regardless of your background, at some point in your childhood, you danced to bàtá. I want people to expect pure storytelling and a complete story that goes beyond Africa.
It is significant for Yoruba cultural preservation because bàtá has been exported for a very long time, even since the era of slavery. Now we are in an age where whoever documents the story keeps it alive. Since bàtá has become a huge part of stage performances, especially in Afrobeats, if we don’t document it now and establish that it is ours, the origin could easily be lost.
People from other continents, far from Africa, Cuba for instance, are already celebrating our orisha, which is connected to a shared history of slavery. That is valid on its own, but now Afrobeats is amplifying bàtá even more. In the recent Red Bull performance by Asake, he had omele bàtá on stage and, for about two minutes, it was used to serenade the audience.
Now imagine someone from another part of the world, maybe China, who is interested in Afrobeats, adopting the same elements without understanding their roots. It could start to look as though the drum does not belong to us, especially to people who don’t know the history. That is why it is important to document our story ourselves, to say this is ours, so that no matter how far it travels in the next hundred years, its origin remains clear.
How are you approaching Rhythm of The Ancestors: Yoruba Bàtá differently from Dòdò Ìkìrẹ̀ in terms of storytelling, research, or visual style?
Bàtá and dòdò ìkìrẹ̀ are two different things. Bàtá has existed long before many of the Yoruba gods, so the approach is very different, even in terms of length. Dòdò ìkìrẹ̀ was captured in less than 20 minutes because that is how much there is to say about it.
But for my bàtá-themed documentary, you cannot exhaust the available information. You could film bàtá for five hours and still not be done; so, the approach has been really tight. For example, we had up to eight hours of conversations and bringing that down to a feature length was a process.
Bàtá has its own color. It exists in vibrant environments because of the festivals around it and the gods that are worshipped. Anyone who sees the documentary will understand what I mean. The colors, the locations we shot in, and the elements required to complete the film all help differentiate it. The research is also deeper than that of dòdò ìkìrẹ̀ because bàtá does not belong to just one state or town. It belongs to the Yoruba people as a whole, and that took us across different states, about three states, to film. The visual style complements the story.
In your view, what role do documentaries play in preserving cultural heritage, especially in Nigeria today?
What I learned from professors and professionals, especially in Yorubaland, is that most Nigerian stories, particularly among Yoruba people, are carried orally. They are not written down, and over time, things get lost.
There’s a popular TikTok challenge where someone whispers something into another person’s ear and it gets passed along until it loses its accuracy. For example, you can say “chlorophyll” at the beginning, and by the time it gets to the last person, it has turned into something else because someone didn’t hear or pronounce it properly. That, in my view, is the role documentaries are supposed to play in Nigeria [ensuring that stories do not lose their accuracy]. We have many stories that need to be documented.
When stories are passed down orally, people forget parts of them. If a story has ten parts, someone might tell you nine, another eight, and it keeps reducing until the story is no longer complete. Before you know it, the story is gone. For Nigeria and Africa today, we have to tell our own stories so that people from outside do not end up telling them from their own perspective.
While working on this project, I saw people being commissioned from outside the African continent to come and research bàtá. That shows how important it is for us to tell our stories and document our cultural heritage ourselves. If we don’t, others who are interested will come in and tell it and, in that way, they can control the narrative.
What advice would you give to other emerging filmmakers who want to explore and document their own cultural stories?
The advice is simple. Be in the story. Know why you really want to document it. To me, documenting our own stories is like helping ourselves, so there is a pointer that exists at some point in time.
I feel like documentary storytelling is an avenue for us to contribute, even if we don’t always see it that way. Just imagine yourself as an author when you are able to document a part of your cultural story.
Try not to control things too much, because cultural stories can push you toward bias based on what you have heard orally, but you have to stay in the story. It takes a lot of research to get what is genuine. Give yourself enough time. It is not something you can rush.
Cultural stories require you to go to multiple places, sometimes five or six, to see what works. Like I said, most of these stories are oral, so you have to verify and confirm what is real, so you don’t end up telling vague or rumored versions. You have to keep making the effort until you get what is right.