Kunle Afolayan's slow cinema turn

Kunle Afolayan has been the most technically ambitious filmmaker in Nigerian cinema for the better part of two decades. What has changed in the last five years is his tempo. The films he has been making since Citation — and especially Anikulapo and its sequel — have slowed down in a way that runs counter to Nigerian commercial rhythm and closer to the tradition of world slow cinema. It is a deliberate turn, and it is producing his best work.

The slow-cinema move is not a stylistic affectation. It is a considered response to what Nigerian cinema has been asked to do for the last generation — carry the emotional weight of a family scene in the time it takes a Hollywood editor to cut away from it. Afolayan is essentially arguing that Nigerian films can and should compose scenes at the pace at which Nigerian life actually moves, and that the international audience is capable of receiving that pace when the film earns it.

The evidence is in the reception. Anikulapo, released on Netflix and expected by many observers to underperform because of its pacing, instead became one of the platform's most-watched Nigerian titles and drew critical attention across markets that had never engaged with Nigerian cinema before. The sequel extended the world without diluting the tempo. The commercial results validated an aesthetic argument that Nigerian producers had, mostly, been reluctant to make.

The critique of Afolayan's slow-cinema turn is a practical one about industry contagion — that his specific talent for the tempo will not scale to junior directors who lack the craft depth to compose at that pace. There is truth to this. Not every filmmaker can hold a slow scene, and the technique in less skilled hands produces drift rather than depth. Afolayan's example is not a template. It is a demonstration that the discipline is possible for those with the craft to sustain it.

What his slow-cinema turn also does, more diffusely, is give younger Nigerian directors permission to reject the commercial pacing they were previously told was mandatory. That permission is a durable cultural contribution regardless of whether Afolayan's specific tempo becomes widely adopted. The next generation of Nigerian filmmakers is going to compose at a wider range of tempos than the last one, and Afolayan's late-career slow turn is a meaningful part of why.