The premise of 3 Cold Dishes is stated plainly in early press materials: three women who were trafficked as young girls, who emerged from that violence as powerful operators in the dangerous underworld they were forced into, now drive across multiple African countries to hunt and kill the men responsible for what happened to them. Revenge drama. Continent-spanning. Co-directed by a Nigerian and a Burkinabè filmmaker. Executive produced by Burna Boy. Released November 2025.
This is a genuinely unusual production. Not unusual because of its genre — revenge thrillers are a well-established tradition that African cinema has not yet explored at this scale — but unusual because of its architecture. The collaboration between Oluseyi ‘Asurf’ Amuwa (Lagos, whose previous work includes the short film and early-career material that positioned him as one of the more formally adventurous directors in contemporary Nollywood) and Apolline Traoré (Ouagadougou, whose 2022 film Frontières was one of the most discussed Francophone African films of its year) is an act of deliberate continental thinking. These two directors share a vision for what African genre cinema can look like when it refuses to stay within any single national tradition.
The ambition is considerable. The execution is mostly equal to it.
What the Film Does Well
The most immediately striking quality of 3 Cold Dishes is its geography. The film moves across multiple African territories — the cities do not all look like Lagos, the roads do not all look like West African highways, the cultural textures shift as the women move — and it does this not in the tourist-eye manner of films that use the continent as exotic backdrop, but in the manner of a film whose writers and directors have made choices about which specific locations mean something to the story they are telling.
This continental span also shapes the film’s tone. The revenge narrative in a single-country context generates a particular kind of momentum — local, concentrated, operating within a known social world. The continental revenge narrative is more episodic, more distended, and requires a different management of audience attachment. Amuwa and Traoré find a rhythm that works: the women’s journey has a quality of accumulation — each encounter adding layers to what we understand about what was done to them and what it has cost — that sustains engagement across the film’s full length.
The three lead performances are the film’s spine. I will not name the actresses individually here because the film’s casting decisions deserve their own feature treatment. What I will say is that the specific challenge of playing women who have survived extreme violence and emerged not broken but formidable, without either sensationalising the survival or aestheticising the formidability, is met by all three with a level of craft that the film does not always give them the screenplay space to fully deploy.
The Strains of Ambition
The film’s first act is its strongest. The establishment of the three women’s current lives — their power, their relationships, their very different ways of carrying what happened to them — is executed with impressive economy. The decision to jump-cut between their present-day lives and the fragmented memory of their trafficking, rather than devoting a conventional backstory sequence to it, is formally smart and emotionally effective.
The second act shows the strain. A film spanning multiple countries and multiple protagonists requires, at some point, a unifying structure that can hold the episodic material in a coherent shape. The screenplay provides this structure — the hunt, the meetings with each of the men responsible — but the transitions between the film’s different geographic and tonal registers are not always smooth. There are sequences in the middle of the film where the editing rhythm loses its confidence and the pacing elongates in ways that feel like management rather than intention.
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The Burna Boy connection — which has dominated the film’s marketing and international press coverage — deserves a direct assessment. His executive producer involvement has given the production a marketing platform and a certain cultural cachet that have clearly opened doors. What it has also done is place the film into a celebrity-product framing that slightly misrepresents what this film actually is. 3 Cold Dishes is a serious, formally ambitious, pan-continental genre film made by two directors with strong individual visions who have chosen to work together. It should be received as that, not as a Burna Boy project that happens to have directors.
What It Represents
The Nigerian-Burkinabè co-direction is, historically, unusual enough to be worth noting for what it signals rather than just what it produces. Amuwa and Traoré working together means that the two major filmmaking traditions of West Africa — the Lagos commercial-theatrical tradition and the Ouagadougou artisanal-political tradition, which have operated largely in separate worlds for their entire existence — have found common creative ground in a genre film. That is not a small thing.
The continent-spanning ambition of 3 Cold Dishes, even where it strains, is the correct direction for African genre cinema to be moving. More of this, please. Better written in its second act. This ambition, fully realised, would be extraordinary cinema. At 80 percent realised, it is still one of the most interesting African films of 2025.
3 Cold Dishes (2025) · Dir. Oluseyi ‘Asurf’ Amuwa & Apolline Traoré · Executive Producer: Burna Boy · English / French / Multiple African languages · Pan-African release 2025
