Lagos Island, 3 a.m.
Best short, South Atlantic Film Week 2026. Official selection, Nocturne Shorts Week 2026. Official selection, Ninth Street Film Festival 2026.
The programmer's note
A staff pick since April. Anane makes records for a living and it shows in what he chooses to film, which is not the performance but the negotiation before the performance. Watch Bayo the engineer, who is the audience surrogate and never announces it. The long take starts at minute nine and runs almost five minutes, and it works because Marisol Okafor cut everything around it tight, so by the time it arrives you are grateful to be let go.
The film
Rooms on Lagos Island rent by the hour and the rate drops after two in the morning. Tola has fifteen thousand naira, one song, and a keyboard player who has agreed to come if he can leave by five. The studio is a converted flat on the fourth floor with a generator out on the balcony and a fuel gauge that the engineer, Bayo, checks the way other people check a watch. Anane, who is a musician before he is a director, films the session as work: the argument about the click track, the three takes that are wrong for three different reasons, the moment the room finally agrees on a tempo. Outside, the island is doing what it does at that hour. The film has one long unbroken take in its final third that a great many people have now watched more than once, and it ends before you learn whether any of it came to anything, which is the correct place to end it.
