NollywoodWeek Paris runs May 6 to 10, 2026, under the theme Voyage. Now in its fourteenth year, the festival — held in Paris and dedicated to Nigerian and African screen culture — has become one of the most consequential platforms for African cinema in the French-speaking world, reaching an audience of diaspora and French attendees who represent exactly the international commercial constituency that the continent’s film industry most needs to cultivate.
The 2026 opening film is East-West Love — a Kenya-Nigeria story directed by Seko Shamte, set in Mombasa, following a post-breakup trip that becomes something more complicated than its premise suggests. The choice of opening film tells you something about the festival’s editorial direction: a Kenya-Nigeria collaboration, set in East Africa, at a festival whose name centres Nigeria is a deliberate statement about the broadening of what “Nollywood” means as a continental rather than purely Nigerian designation. The pan-African co-production model is no longer an aspiration for NollywoodWeek’s programmers — it is the opening night.
The Industry Context Around the Festival
Two pieces of news published this week provide the industry context in which NollywoodWeek 2026 is taking place.
MBO Capital — the pan-African private equity firm that was one of the two financing partners on Clarissa, the Esiri Brothers’ film now at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight — has publicly doubled down on its Nollywood investment strategy despite the distribution challenges that the industry continues to face. MBO’s position is a statement of institutional confidence at a moment when the streaming commissioning landscape has contracted significantly. The firm is betting on the theatrical market’s resilience and on the long-term value of owning intellectual property in the African content space. Their continued investment in Nollywood, despite the distribution headwinds, is one of the more meaningful commercial signals in the industry this month.
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The second piece of context: a new African International Short Film Market — AISFM — is holding its first edition in Lagos. The short film has been the most productive pipeline for emerging African talent across the past three years — the generation currently arriving at Venice, Rotterdam, and Sundance overwhelmingly built their visibility through short films. An African short film market, specifically designed for commercial deal-making around short film intellectual property, is the infrastructure piece that has been missing from the pipeline. The first edition of AISFM in Lagos is a tentative but consequential institutional step.
What NollywoodWeek Measures
NollywoodWeek has expanded its programme with new industry partnerships in its 2026 edition. The combination of a Kenya-Nigeria opening film, a growing industry programme alongside the screenings, and the broader context of MBO Capital’s investment confidence and Lagos’s new short film market creates a picture of an industry that is navigating significant structural pressure — the Showmax closure, the distribution challenges, the streaming contraction — without losing its creative or institutional momentum.
The theme of the festival is Voyage. It is a good word for where Nollywood is in May 2026. In transit. Destination real but route still being determined. The films screening in Paris this week are the evidence that the journey is continuing regardless.
NollywoodWeek Paris 2026: May 6–10. Sources: What Kept Me Up (May 2026 — NollywoodWeek announcement, MBO Capital, AISFM). — Adaeze Okoye. RollCallAfrica, May 2026.
