Q2 2026 · Roll Call Africa Rising Watchlist™
The Rising Watchlist™ has a specific bias toward people whose trajectory has been built slowly and evidentially from the ground up — where each step can be verified and where the accumulation of evidence, rather than a single event, is the argument. Dika Ofoma’s trajectory is the clearest example of this on the continent right now.
He is twenty-five years old. He grew up in Gombe in Northern Nigeria to an Igbo family, moved to Enugu for university, and began making films in 2020 after a hiking trip during which a friend asked him: “You talk about film a lot. What’s the end goal?” Within weeks he had written a script and shot it on his friend’s phone. He had never studied filmmaking formally. He had read Syd Field’s The Foundations of Screenwriting and watched StudioBinder tutorials on YouTube. He started where he was with what he had and made something watchable enough that people noticed.
What followed across four years was a discipline of accumulation: short films that grew in formal confidence and festival reach with each new title. God’s Wife screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2025 and the New York African Film Festival in 2025, and won him the Rising Star Award at S16, Lagos’s most significant pipeline for emerging independent Nigerian filmmakers. Obi Is a Boy — about a young man returning home for his mother’s funeral who is forced to confront family expectations and questions of identity — competed at Venice’s Orizzonti Short Films section in 2025, at IFFR 2026 in competition, and at Clermont-Ferrand 2026, the most important short film festival in the world, where it competed alongside work from every territory on earth.
Then came Locarno. In August 2025, at the Open Doors programme — the most significant development platform for African and global south cinema — his debut feature Kachifo (Till the Morning Comes) won three awards: the Open Doors Grant from visions sud est worth CHF20,000, the Prix Arte Kino International worth €6,000, and the Sørfond Award giving the project a platform at the Norwegian pitching event. The film is a queer romance set in both pre-colonial Igbo society and modern-day Nigeria, produced by Blessing Uzzi of Bluhouse Studios in Lagos, budgeted at €1.3 million. It is scheduled to begin shooting in Enugu from October 2026.
The Locarno pipeline has produced Mati Diop, Rungano Nyoni, Dani Kouyaté. It is the development programme with the most reliable record of identifying African filmmakers who build sustained international careers. That Ofoma’s feature is in this pipeline, with confirmed financing and an October 2026 shoot, while his short films are simultaneously completing festival circuits at Venice and Clermont-Ferrand, is the strongest argument RollCallAfrica can make for his inclusion on this list. He has mentors in CJ Obasi, Abba Makama, and Michael Omonua — the architects of Nigeria’s most formally adventurous cinema. He is writing culture journalism for Africa Is a Country and Dazed simultaneously, which means he is thinking about the context of what he is making, not just making it.
He is twenty-five years old. He starts shooting his debut feature in October. RollCallAfrica will be watching every frame.
Territory: Nigeria · Role: Director, Writer · Watch for: Kachifo (Till the Morning Comes) — production October 2026
