Making of Last Flight to Abuja

The behind-the-scenes documentary on Obi Emelonye's Last Flight to Abuja is one of the few pieces of Nigerian production journalism that has been made about a Nigerian genre film at scale, and it is worth studying as much for what it reveals about Nigerian genre production practice as for what it reveals about the film itself. The documentary was produced with the co-operation of the Emelonye team and released alongside the film's home-video window.

The production challenge Last Flight to Abuja set itself was ambitious. A commercial-aviation thriller requires either significant VFX budget or physical mock-up capacity, and the Nigerian industry at the time had access to neither at the scale a Hollywood production would take for granted. The documentary shows the Emelonye team improvising both — a combination of practical set construction, digital compositing done on limited budget, and location work at Lagos airport that required negotiations no American production would have to make.

The craft compromises are visible in the finished film, and the documentary is honest about them. Some of the VFX shots do not hold up to close scrutiny; some of the physical rig work is more visible than a larger budget would have allowed. But the documentary is arguably more valuable for showing those compromises than it would be for hiding them, because it demonstrates the actual conditions under which Nigerian genre film has been produced and the specific problems the next generation of Nigerian producers will have to solve.

The critique of the Last Flight documentary is a fair one about editorial distance. The film's producers were involved in the making of the behind-the-scenes coverage, which means the tonal register is more promotional than a fully independent production journalism piece would be. Fair enough. That is a common constraint of making-of documentaries generally, and it does not fully undermine the informational value of the coverage.

What the documentary demonstrates, more than anything, is the case for a broader tradition of Nigerian production journalism — the making-of documentaries, the archival oral histories, the departmental studies that in Hollywood would be routine and in Nollywood are rare. Nigerian cinema has been under-covered by its own industry press for decades, and a stronger tradition of production journalism would produce a documentary infrastructure that would benefit the industry's institutional memory. The Last Flight documentary is an early example. There should be more.