When you watch the ‘Iwe Ala: An Ojude Oba Story’ trailer, it looks like it was filmed inside the festival it centres on.

It wasn’t.

“We had to create the festival,” director Adeoluwa Owu tells Nollywire at the movie’s premiere. “That’s why we’re filmmakers.”

Ojude Oba is one of the most visible cultural gatherings today, and shooting within it would have meant working around the event. Rebuilding it allowed the film to shape it, and the result is a version of the festival designed for the camera: staged, controlled, and made to feel real.

“It’s supposed to be believable,” Owu says. “You should feel like you’re part of it.”

Executive producer Chief Mrs Olawumi Fajemirokun says the choice of Ojude Oba was deliberate.

“It’s globally recognised,” she says. “If you ask anyone to name top festivals, it will come up.”

There are older festivals. But Ojude Oba has scale, visibility, and reach. It travels across social media, across borders, across generations.

In Iwe Ala, it becomes a setting for a family story but also a stand-in for a wider cultural memory.

The material is home to Owobo Ogunde, who plays the film’s lead character. His connection to the story predates the film; he grew up near Ijebu-Ode and attended the festival regularly.

“I used to go for Ojude Oba,” he says. “So this is something I feel connected to.”

His performance in the film draws from lived experience, and Ogunde’s own background working within his father’s travelling theatre company mirrors that process. Storytelling, for him, has always involved rebuilding moments for an audience.

There is a noticeable shift happening around the festival itself.

Jamal Oreagba, the son of Farooq Oreagba, recently moved back from England, and he has noticed a growing curiosity among younger people.

“I had to ask myself what I actually know about my culture,” he says. “Not what I was told, but what I’ve experienced.”

He has since had people reach out to him for context: students, peers, and others trying to understand the festival beyond the spectacle.

“It’s good to see people taking interest,” he says. “We’re the ones who will carry it.”

Chief Fajemirokun insists that, like ‘Afamefuna’, the film is not just for now.

“We’re recording history,” she says. “We want it to still be relevant 20, 50 years from now.”

Festivals change. Meanings shift. What is familiar now will not remain so, and that ambition to fix a version of the festival that can outlast the moment it was made in on screen guided the production.

‘Iwe Ala: An Ojude Oba Story’ is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

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