For the first time in 51 years, a Nigerian film has received recognition from a jury at the Toronto International Film Festival. Kaelo Iyizoba’s The Spectacular Death of Prisca was awarded an Honourable Mention by the Short Cuts Jury at TIFF 2026, where the 23-minute film was recognised in the Best International Short Film category. The jury drew attention to the film’s unusual collision of melodrama, action and comedy, as well as the confidence with which it handles its heightened family drama. The award came as TIFF announced the winners of its 51st edition, with Elia Kalogianni’s MAMMALIA taking the Best International Short Film prize.

Iyizoba’s film arrives at TIFF with a deliberately familiar Nigerian cinematic vocabulary. At its centre is Prisca, played by Rita Dominic, a divorced woman whose daughter is preparing for marriage. Following a confrontation between mother and daughter, Prisca slips into an imagined Nollywood world where she becomes Madam P, the leader of an all-female criminal syndicate. Iyizoba, a Nigerian-American filmmaker, Columbia MFA graduate and Berlinale Talents fellow, has described the project as an attempt to approach the Nollywood he grew up watching with affection rather than irony. The film draws on the heightened performances, outrageous premises and visual excess of an earlier Nollywood era while using those elements to explore identity and the ways Nigerian women are defined by social expectations.

The Spectacular Death of Prisca began as part of a much larger ambition. Iyizoba had been developing a feature-length project, A Nollywood Story, but found himself struggling to communicate what its imagined Nollywood universe would look and feel like. The short became his answer: a proof of concept that could give physical form to the world he had been trying to describe on the page. Developed through the 2025 TIFF Directors’ Lab and shot shortly afterwards, the film became a way of testing the visual language of what Iyizoba calls his “Nollyverse.” Its Honourable Mention now gives that experiment its own place in TIFF history, while offering a glimpse of where the filmmaker may take his larger Nollywood-inspired universe next.

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