The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos

“We are part of a movement called the Nigeria Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, a movement of the urban poor to champion their dignity and development. At the international level, we are known as Slum Dwellers International. We usually have our federation meetings twice a month, where all of the community service members come together to discuss our community problems and issues. It’s actually easier for us to get ourselves together this way because we have a platform from where the community can take the information back home. The model we tried to use was bringing people with lived experience from these communities into both the cast and crew – wherever possible. From a cast perspective, we were building up a model rooted in the idea of co-creation, but also based on films like City of God that had used a similar model and, in doing so, had achieved a unique form of realism, which is part of why it resonated so well with people.”

Akinmuyiwa Bisola, Mathew Cerf