When Olive Nwosu’s Lady premiered at Sundance earlier this year, it announced a striking new directorial voice. The film went on to win the World Cinema Dramatic Competition’s Special Jury Award for Acting Ensemble, screened at the Berlinale, and was acquired by Cohen Media Group for U.S. distribution.

 

All of it came off the strength of a story Nwosu had been quietly building for years: a fiercely independent female cab driver in Lagos, pulled into the orbit of her childhood friend turned sex worker, and the unlikely sisterhood that follows. It is, in Nwosu’s words, a love letter to the women of Lagos.

 

For The Nollywood Reporter, both Nwosu and lead actor Amanda Oruh, who plays Pinky, spoke about the years of research, the trust built on set, and why they refused to let the film moralize.

 

Building an authentic Lagos

For Nwosu, Lady began with a desire to write about a young woman in Lagos, a city she has known her whole life. “It came from a desire to write a story from a young woman in Lagos,” she says. “I’ve read Lagos throughout my life, and this story feels that.”

 

She wanted to understand her heroine as “strong, vibrant,” and she wanted the film to capture the other side of Lagos too. That instinct shaped her entire process.

 

“Film is about trusting the story you write, trusting your actors,” she says. She describes paying close attention to subtext and relationships, and to detail in every frame, so that “every choice in the image serves” the story, with rhythm, pacing and feeling allowed to build naturally rather than being forced.

 

As a director, staying honest to Lagos meant pushing her heads of department toward authenticity, she says, rather than a sanitized or overly polished version of the city, using vibrant colours to tell that truth.

 

Much of what makes Lady feel lived-in, rather than performed, came from how it was cast. “The characters were excellent,” Nwosu says. “It doesn’t matter if they have acted before.”

 

She had the opportunity, she adds, to work with real-life sex workers during the process, research she describes as essential to grounding the film rather than approaching the subject from a distance. Her casting directors, led by Sukanmi Adebayo, went to various places across the city and gathered roughly 300 audition tapes, narrowing the pool down gradually over close to a year, through multiple stages and a final workshop, before the cast was set.

 

Ask Nwosu what she learned making her debut feature, and she doesn’t talk about technique first. “It was the collaboration,” she says, “the exchange with the community, with the industry, with everyone who trusted me with their story.” She says she absorbed just as much from the research itself, from the writing and the setting and the slow work of building out the cast.

 

Shooting in real locations across Lagos, from street scenes to background performers, meant staying low-key and respectful, she says. “It was all real. Told not a lot of people, and respectful.”

 

At its core, Nwosu says, Lady is a story about “what it means to be a young woman from Lagos.” It’s a conversation about the city as a modern metropolis, about the pull toward “going for something” and the cost that comes with it, and, ultimately, “a conviction to tell Lagos.”

 

Reception so far, she says, has been good. “I’ve been in the film for a long time, and now seeing it from the audience’s perspective is good.” She describes the whole experience as one that “feels intimate,” even in “the eyes of the outsiders” encountering her Lagos for the first time.

 

Finding Pinky

If Nwosu built the film’s foundation, Amanda Oruh’s performance as Pinky is a large part of why Lady earned that ensemble award at Sundance. For Oruh, the decision to join the project came down almost entirely to the writing.

 

“Olive’s script is the primary reason I decided to be a part of it,” she says. “You know that thing where you read a script and your entire being knows that you have to be a part of this kind of project.”

 

What struck her, she explains, was how fully human Nwosu made every woman on the page. “She refused to sanitize these women’s lives or reduce them to stereotypes,” Oruh says of her character, Pinky, and the ensemble around her. “They weren’t victims. They were fully written as human, complex, and surviving with agency, women who wanted to live and thrive regardless of what society had thrown at them.”

 

That honesty, paired with the chance to tell a story titled Lady that was ultimately about sisterhood, made the role impossible to pass up.

 

Oruh describes the process of building Pinky as one that reshaped her entirely as an actor. “I started by letting go of the need to make Pinky likeable,” she says. “I had to drop every judgment that I have towards sex workers, towards Pinky, and even towards myself.”

 

Working with Nwosu meant resisting judgment altogether. Instead, she examined, in detail, the circumstances that might push anyone into sex work, rarely out of desire, she says, but survival.

 

Rather than researching the role from the outside, Oruh says she kept returning to a single question: “What would I do if survival looked like that?” That question, she says, became her way into empathy rather than distance from the character.

 

Extensive rehearsal, with Nwosu directly, and with co-stars including Jessica Gabriel and Bucci Franklin, shaped the performance long before filming began.

 

What stretched her most, she says, was “playing someone society constantly judges without making her palatable,” and sitting with the discomfort that came with it, both Pinky’s and her own. She points to scenes built around impossible choices, moments where, as she puts it, “there’s no other option but to do it,” as the emotional core of what made the role difficult, and, in her view, worth telling honestly.

 

A sisterhood beyond the screen

Oruh credits the ensemble’s chemistry directly to Nwosu’s approach on set. “She built that safety net from the get-go, from the audition, from the workshop,” Oruh says.

 

She describes a process where the cast shared intimate experiences and trusted those disclosures would stay protected. Wellness coaches and guided sessions during workshops helped the actors work through emotions “we’ve been hiding,” she says, and that vulnerability became the foundation for the bonds visible on screen.

 

“When Pinky leans on the other women, I was actually leaning on my castmate,” Oruh says. She credits Nwosu with making sure no one performance overshadowed another: “If one person shines, the rest have to shine… we all had to lean on one another.” That trust, she says, is why the ensemble award felt earned rather than incidental.

 

The cast lived and rehearsed together during the shoot, housed in the same apartment, by design. Oruh describes bonds from the production that have lasted well past filming, which wrapped in 2024.

 

“I have never experienced such a level of collaboration in my ten years acting professionally in Nollywood,” she says.

Shooting on location across Lagos shaped her performance directly, too. Having been born and raised in the city, Oruh says its chaos and hustle are inseparable from the film itself.

 

“Being in that environment… reminded me that these aren’t abstract characters,” she says. “Women like Pinky exist in the streets… not just in Lagos, globally.”

 

Oruh is direct about what she believes audiences often get wrong about roles like Pinky. “Complexity does not equal endorsement,” she says. “Playing a sex worker doesn’t mean I’m making a statement.” The film, she stresses, was never about glamorizing sex work, it was about “exploring a human being’s reality.”

 

She pushes back on the idea that stories like this need a clean moral takeaway. “We’re not here to moralize,” she says. “We’re here to tell the story the way it was, true, raw, unbelievable, really seeing them for who they are.”

 

What stayed with her most after wrapping the film, she says, was the sisterhood built with her castmates. She names Jessica Gabriel, Tinuade Jemiseye, Eva Ibiam, Fadesaye Olateru-Olabegi and others as “new sisters,” along with a renewed sense of purpose.

 

“This is the work I want to do. Stories that challenge… that trust women to be messy and complicated and fully human.”

 

Lady continues its international festival run ahead of its U.S. release through Cohen Media Group.