Professor Hyginus Ekwuazi belongs to that rare pioneering generation whose work did not merely interpret Nigerian cinema but brought its critical language into being. Scholar, filmmaker, poet, and institution-builder, Ekwuazi provided some of the earliest rigorous frameworks for understanding film production in Nigeria—historically, aesthetically, and politically. His seminal Film in Nigeria remains a touchstone text, mapping the evolution of cinema from colonial mediation to postcolonial self-articulation. Beyond the page, his stewardship of key national film institutions – he was the pioneering Director of the Nigeran Film Institute and later Director of the Nigerian Film Corporation in Jos – and his consultancy work across global cultural bodies anchored scholarship firmly within practice and policy. Yet perhaps his most enduring legacy lies in mentorship: the quiet, generative labor of shaping minds that would go on to transform the field.

Among the most distinguished of those minds is Professor Onookome Okome. Taught and supervised by Ekwuazi, Okome emerges as both intellectual heir and bold scholar and theorist of Nigerian cinema. As one of the pioneering scholars of Nollywood studies, his work has persistently redirected attention to African popular culture and the “art of the everyday,” insisting on the analytical seriousness of popular film, literature, and ordinary cultural practices. Through influential publications and landmark conferences, Okome has helped globalize Nollywood studies while grounding it firmly in African epistemologies and social realities.

Kolawole Olaiya of Nollywood in Review had a conversion with Professors Ekwuazi and Okome at the University of Ibadan in July 2025. This conversation unfolds at the confluence of mentorship, memory, and method—where origins meet afterlives, and where Nigerian film studies returns to one of its most generative scenes: the encounter between a founding intellect and a formidable inheritor of his intellectual vision. Professors Ekwuazi and Okome stand not simply as distinguished scholars, but as emblematic figures in the making and remaking of African cinema studies itself.

Bringing Ekwuazi and Okome into conversation in an office space at the University of Ibadan is thus not a mere interview but an intellectual homecoming. It stages a dialogue between foundational thought and its creative extensions, between a mentor who helped create a field and a scholar who has expanded its horizons. In this exchange at the University of Ibadan where it all started, we witness Nigerian cinema thinking itself—across generations, across geographies, and across time. This interesting conversation should be of interest to film lovers, students, researchers, and Nollywood scholars.