Derin Vs Life is an intriguing two-part family/romantic drama centred on Derin, a single mother navigating a complicated co-parenting relationship with Rogba, the father of her son, Prince. Rogba comes across as irresponsible in many aspects of his life, but certainly not towards his son. Yet Derin struggles to trust him — perhaps made even more complicated by the lingering suggestion that she may still have feelings for him.
Then there is Gbenga, the seemingly responsible and dependable man now in Derin’s life, who has comfortably assumed a fatherly role towards Prince and eventually proposes marriage. But here is where the premise becomes even more interesting: Gbenga has a child of his own and is confronted with similar co-parenting tensions involving his baby mother. Suddenly, Derin isn’t simply dealing with the baggage of her own previous relationship; she is also having to navigate someone else’s.
Irewole Olaniyan, Gabriel Afolayan and Tunde Aderinaoye share great chemistry, which helps them embody their roles and navigate the complexities of co-parenting, lingering emotions and new relationships. Young Molawa Onajobi, who plays Prince, is equally difficult to overlook, showing genuine potential in his portrayal of a child caught in the middle of his parents’ complicated relationship. Yet this is another area where the absence of a well-treated screenplay becomes evident: Prince’s presence offers an opportunity to explore how the tensions between his parents affect the child emotionally, but the story barely scratches the surface. It is nevertheless this human dynamic that keeps the movie directed by Mo' Fakorede engaging despite its shortcomings.
Unfortunately, the production doesn’t quite match the strength of its premise, leaving some of its dramatic choices difficult to digest. At times, it feels as though the film was acted straight from a first draft rather than a properly treated screenplay. The dialogue, rendered in both Yoruba and English, is a particular example: several heated exchanges between Derin and Rogba include repeated use of the F-word and other abusive language — sometimes right in front of young Prince — without enough dramatic justification or sensitivity to the situation.
And that is perhaps the frustrating thing about Derin Vs Life: beneath the not-too-good production and underdeveloped screenplay is a potentially very good relationship drama. The story has something interesting to say about modern relationships, blended families and the contradictions of co-parenting. It simply needed more treatment before the cameras started rolling.
- Jimi D Baldheaded Guy
NOLLYWOOD HAS NO TRIBE
Beyond Francis Duru’s “Yoruba takeover” argument — and the ethnic labels we keep imposing on an evolving industry.
This tribal consciousness has eaten so deeply into our psyche that we often interpret issues, situations and even the natural evolution of industries through the prism of ethnic differences. And I think that is partly what is happening with the recent comments attributed to veteran Nollywood actor Francis Duru, who expressed concern about what he sees as the Yoruba sector increasingly taking over Nollywood in the modern digital age.
His argument, as I understand it, is that the Igbo traders and marketers who played a major role in creating and financing the early home-video industry have gradually been overshadowed, while the Yoruba sector has flourished — partly because, in his view, Yoruba practitioners have historically been better organised.
There is certainly an important conversation to be had about organisation, investment and how different sections of Nollywood have adapted to cinema, streaming and YouTube. But I think framing that evolution primarily in tribal terms risks oversimplifying not only the history of Nollywood, but also the cultural environment from which much of the industry emerged.
THE LAGOS FACTOR
One important factor we sometimes overlook is Lagos itself.
Many of the early practitioners who shaped what eventually became Nollywood were based in Lagos, and some had spent significant parts of their lives and professional careers there. They worked together, lived within the same communities and operated within the same television, theatre, entertainment and commercial networks.
In that environment, cultural identities were not always as neatly divided as we sometimes present them today. Lagos created its own orientation.
Indeed, among many Lagos-raised Nigerians, the ability to speak Yoruba does not necessarily tell you whether someone is ethnically Yoruba. An Igbo, Edo, Urhobo or other Nigerian who grew up in Lagos could speak Yoruba fluently, understand its humour and cultural references, and move comfortably between different social communities.
So when we retrospectively divide early Nollywood practitioners strictly into “Igbo filmmakers” and “Yoruba filmmakers”, we risk imposing much sharper ethnic boundaries on an industry whose practitioners were often interacting, collaborating and doing business within the same Lagos ecosystem.
Before the Nollywood label became popular, producers such as Amaka Igwe and Zeb Ejiro were already taking television-style drama and production methods into the emerging home-video market, drawing heavily from actors, writers, directors and technicians who had worked in Nigerian television. At roughly the same time, practitioners from the Yoruba travelling-theatre tradition were making their own transition through television, celluloid and eventually video.
The VHS economy then opened filmmaking to a much larger group of entrepreneurs and creatives. And again, regardless of where they originally came from, many were operating from Lagos.
Even the history surrounding Kenneth Nnebue, Living in Bondage and the commercial explosion of the early 1990s demonstrates how interconnected these supposedly separate traditions were. Before Living in Bondage became the landmark that it was, Nnebue had already been involved in Yoruba-language video productions and operated within a market where pioneers such as Alade Aromire had demonstrated the commercial possibilities of producing and distributing films directly on video.
That history makes it difficult to sustain a simple narrative in which one tribe “created Nollywood” and another tribe has subsequently “taken it over”.
AND THEN CAME A DIFFERENT NOLLYWOOD
There is another problem with applying the old ethnic divisions to today's industry: modern Nollywood itself has changed.
Look at the typical mainstream Nollywood film today. Increasingly, the stories are not constructed around an exclusively Igbo or Yoruba social environment. They reflect the integrated reality of contemporary Nigerian urban life.
A single film might feature Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Efik or Hausa characters — sometimes without their ethnicity even being relevant to the story. The actors may come from completely different parts of Nigeria from the characters they portray. The director may be from one ethnic background, the producer from another, while the production company, financiers, crew and distribution platform have no meaningful ethnic identity at all.
That is not accidental. It reflects the modern social environment from which much of contemporary Nollywood draws its stories — particularly Lagos, where Nigerians of different backgrounds work, marry, socialise and build businesses together.
In other words, the narrative language of mainstream Nollywood has itself become increasingly integrated.
WHAT ABOUT YOUTUBE?
This becomes even clearer when we look at the current YouTube economy.
I would challenge the suggestion that any single ethnic group dominates Nollywood on YouTube.
What we are seeing instead is an extraordinarily decentralised production economy in which individual actors, producers and production companies can build their own channels, finance films, commission productions and reach millions of viewers without going through the traditional marketer or distributor.
And the successful players come from across the Nigerian cultural landscape.
More importantly, many of the films themselves cannot meaningfully be described as “Yoruba films”, “Igbo films” or films belonging to any particular ethnic sector. They are simply Nollywood films — usually English-language productions populated by culturally mixed casts and built around contemporary Nigerian relationships, families, workplaces and communities.
YouTube has therefore arguably weakened rather than strengthened some of the old industry boundaries. The important questions are increasingly: Who owns the channel? Who controls the audience? Who understands the algorithm? Who can consistently produce content people want to watch?
The algorithm certainly doesn't ask where you come from.
PERHAPS THE REAL ISSUE IS STRUCTURE
This is why I think the most interesting part of Francis Duru's observation is not the suggestion that Yoruba people have “taken over” Nollywood. It is his acknowledgement that the Yoruba sector has historically been organised.
That deserves much deeper examination.
The old Yoruba theatre-company and later caucus system created structures through which generations learned acting, writing, directing, production and, importantly, how to create their own work. Those networks evolved through travelling theatre, television, home video, cinema and now streaming and digital distribution.
If practitioners emerging from that tradition are particularly visible or commercially successful today, then perhaps the question shouldn't be:
“How did the Yoruba take over Nollywood?”
Perhaps it should be:
“What structures enabled some practitioners to adapt successfully from one era of Nollywood to another — and what can the wider industry learn from them?”
Because Nollywood's history does not comfortably belong to one ethnic group, the television practitioners contributed. The travelling-theatre companies contributed. The Igbo marketers and distributors contributed enormously to the home-video explosion. Independent producers, directors, actors and technicians from across Nigeria contributed.
And now another generation is taking the industry through cinema, streaming, YouTube and whatever comes next.
Perhaps the greatest mistake would be to look at that evolution and see tribes competing for ownership, when what we are actually witnessing is an industry continuously adapting to new technologies, new business models and a Nigerian society that has itself become increasingly interconnected.
Nollywood was never the property of one tribe. And its future should not be interpreted as the victory of another.