One of the hottest tickets at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival 2025, which kicked off yesterday, was When Nigeria Happen, the third feature film from Nigerian director Ema Edosio-Deelen. The film opened the annual festival’s Open Doors Programme earlier today, but if you were after a ticket this morning, you were out of luck. It was sold out.
The festival mercifully opened up a few tickets and those who persevered where able to see the film. By then, a long line of ticket holders and hopefuls snaked out of the Teatro Kursaal venue of the screening. Asked why she was waiting to see the film about an hour before the 11am screening, one ticket holder said she’s interested in what happens in the region. “Africa has interesting artists,” she added.
It’s a statement that would have pleased the festival director Giona A. Nazzaro, who was on hand to introduce Zsuzsi Bankuti, head of Open Doors. Nazzaro praised Bankuti for her work and described Open Doors as the heart of the Locarno Film Festival, adding that the idea wasn’t that his festival was opening doors to Africa but instead it was opening up Switzerland to other cultures.
“It makes me feel good when there’s such a turn out,” he said.
Edosio-Deelen was present to introduce her film. She had arrived, alongside the Open Doors team and its chosen filmmakers, some 25 minutes before the screening. She did a little dance after she was told that tickets for the screening were sold out on the Locarno website. Her film follows a group of dancers based in Lagos, Nigeria, as their leader, Fagbo, goes through a period of turbulence in his personal life. And in her introduction, Edosio-Deelen said she hoped the audience goes home with them.
Never mind home. Some audience members were unwilling to leave the venue after the screening, as query after query reigned during an engaging Q and A session. Perhaps the most memorable of them came from a filmmaker who wanted to know why there were no co-production credits at the end of the project. How did Edosio-Deelen manage to make the film, he asked.
The filmmaker sighed, saying she didn’t want to spend 10 years looking for grants to make her films, so she does what she can with what she has. “I raised the money myself and made it,” she said. “I don’t want to be [the kind of] filmmaker that at the end of my life has made only two films.”
Another question was forthcoming, but a member of the festival team had to put an end to the engaging session. Locarno’s Africa-focused Open Doors programme had officially opened. But its first screening needed to come to an end.
