Nigerian-born screenwriter and director Sarah Juma walks away from the Cannes World Film Festival with the Best African Film award, presented by the festival’s founder, Karolina Bomba, and a nomination for Best Human Rights Film. The motion picture had previously received top honours for its screenwriting at the West African Film Festival in Texas.
The film which ends with a dedication to the nearly 50,000 individuals incarcerated without trial in Nigeria, tackles class inequality at its forefront. It follows the story of a housekeeper named Matilda who is jailed at the request of the minister of education, while a teachers’ strike ravages the nation in the background. Juma said, “I’m the sort of storyteller who will always infuse exposés on sociopolitical issues, especially culturally-specific ones, into my fictional writing; I felt like I had to talk about this particular topic because it weighs on me a lot.” Juma is no stranger to this kind of storytelling.