Two new Nigeria-Kenya film co-productions have been confirmed: Cheta Chukwu’s The Child Will Carry You and Ella Chikezie’s Nwanne. NollywoodWeek Paris 2026 opened with Seko Shamte’s East-West Love — a Kenya-Nigeria love story set in Mombasa. The most commercially promising pan-African film creative relationship currently developing is not between Nigeria and South Africa, which have different industry structures and production cultures, or between Nigeria and Ghana, which share cultural proximity but have a significant commercial scale gap. It is between Nigeria and Kenya.
The reasons are structural. Kenya’s film industry has been building its festival circuit presence for the better part of a decade — the two consecutive Sundance selections, the Berlinale documentary presence, the growing short film pipeline — at the same time that Nollywood has been building its international co-production infrastructure. The two industries are at complementary stages of development: Nollywood has the commercial infrastructure and the diaspora distribution relationships; the Kenyan industry has the formal prestige and the East African production talent. A co-production relationship that combines both is commercially logical.
What the New Projects Represent
Cheta Chukwu’s The Child Will Carry You and Ella Chikezie’s Nwanne are the latest in what What Kept Me Up has described as a continuing pattern of Nigeria-Kenya film collaborations. Both projects cross the specific cultural bridge between Igbo-Nigerian and Kenyan storytelling traditions that NollywoodWeek’s East-West Love also navigated — stories that are rooted in one tradition but produced with creative and financial partnership across the two.
The commercial logic for Kenyan producers is access to Nollywood’s distribution infrastructure — the FilmOne theatrical network, the streaming relationships with Netflix and Prime Video that Nigerian producers have built, the diaspora audience in the UK and US that responds to Nigerian content. The creative logic for Nigerian filmmakers is access to the East African landscape, the Kenyan production talent pool, and the formal credibility that comes with a co-production partner whose festival circuit presence gives the project a different kind of international positioning than a purely Nigerian production would have.
The Bridge That NollywoodWeek Named
The decision to open NollywoodWeek Paris 2026 with East-West Love was a curatorial statement that the festival made deliberately. A festival called NollywoodWeek choosing a Kenya-Nigeria film as its opening night is the programming equivalent of the industry saying: the future of African cinema is not one nation’s cinema. It is the conversation between them. The Nigeria-Kenya creative pipeline is the most active version of that conversation currently in production.
RollCallAfrica will be tracking both The Child Will Carry You and Nwanne through development and into production. The Nigeria-Kenya bridge is being built one film at a time.
Sources: NollywoodWeek 2026 opening film announcement. — Kwame Asante. RollCallAfrica, 14 May 2026.
