Kaelo Iyizoba makes history as first Nigerian to earn TIFF short honours, says it is just 'the tip of the iceberg’

No Nigerian short film had ever received an Honourable Mention for Best International Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. That was until this year, when Kaelo Iyizoba's The Spectacular Death of Prisca, a fever-dream homage to old Nollywood starring Rita Dominic, took that honour at TIFF 2026, happening to also be the only African film in the festival's entire lineup this year.

The film follows Madame P, played by Dominic, who, on the day of her daughter's wedding, is pulled into the exaggerated, theatrical world of an old Nollywood movie and forced to confront who she is once the labels she's built her life around start falling away. It's also, by Kaelo's own design, a proof of concept: a standalone short built to pitch a much larger feature he's been developing for years.

Kaelo Iyizoba was always creative as a kid: writing, drawing, staging plays with his cousins, but growing up in Nigeria, he'd been convinced that was "a child's folly," not a career. He followed his father's wish for a doctor and his sister's path into pharmacy school instead, knowing by his first day it was the wrong fit. 

He finished anyway, then quit after a punishing 9-to-10 job left him realising he hadn't seen a sunset in months. "I could not continue to pretend that this was the life I was meant to live," he says. A cousin's nudge toward Columbia's film program, and one application later, he was in.

Nollywood wasn't something he discovered; it was the backdrop of his childhood. Raised in Nigeria until his early teens, he grew up on the DVDs everyone secretly loved and publicly dismissed. 

His family wore out their copy of Uncle Wayward, he says, "till the CD started to crack." That contradiction of films dismissed as low-budget somehow beating Hollywood for a household's attention provides the backdrop of everything The Spectacular Death of Prisca turned out to be. 

This isn't Kaelo's first time at TIFF; he came through the Directors' Lab in 2025, calling it “sort of like school.” This year, he's back with a film in competition, and as the only African filmmaker in the entire lineup.

Read our interview with Kaelo below:

In a way, it fuels me. It feels like more spaces need to be made, so there's work to be done. I hope that this door that opened for me this year, as I walk through it, I will prop it open and leave it open for more people from the continent, from Nigeria, doing the work.

I hope it creates the understanding that your film doesn't have to fit the style we're used to for African films that go to these big festivals, that you can make whatever is pinching at your heart, and it will resonate with the world.

Rita's presence is the film; 'shapes the film' doesn't quite cover it. She is the titular character, Madame P, and I knew this film needed to be carried by somebody who carried everything we loved about old Nollywood, iconic in that era, but also very present in Nollywood today.

I'd rewatched The Meeting by Auntie Mildred Okwo recently before making the film, and I knew Rita was the person for it. The way she let go of herself to become that character was masterful. I don't think I've seen that done in Nigeria, honestly.

My job as a director is to create the environment where we can catch these performances. I don't create them; I merely try to catch them. So my job was really to get out of the way and let Rita do what she's done legendarily for almost three decades.

A wedding is a crucible. The tensions are high, the stakes are high, and it's supposed to be this big day where your daughter is being sent off. For our protagonist Prisca, it marks a turn where she feels like she's no longer a mother; her daughter is leaving home, and the labels she's clung to are leaving one by one. So it's like, who is she now? She has to face herself.

I feel like Nigerian women haven't been fully done justice in our storytelling. I wanted to look at them beyond the labels: mother, daughter, wife, to look at them as themselves, as what they bring to this world as them. I've watched Nigerian women in my life fulfil these roles, but never really express who they are outside of them. At what point do women get to put themselves first?

That intimacy with Prisca's inner life isn't incidental, as the film exists, by Kaelo's own admission, to open doors for something bigger. "It's in the name: the proof of concept," he says.

He's already feeling TIFF's effects: "The types of emails I'm getting, the people reaching out, this is actually real." What he's hoping it secures is funding for the real destination: a feature called A Nollywood Story.

I've been writing the feature for almost six years. Everybody thinks the idea is lovely, but in the ecosystems where I have to pitch it, Nollywood isn't that familiar. People wonder what that world would look like, feel like. 

I could describe it verbally, but until people can see and feel it, they wouldn't truly understand it. So this film was really a proof-of-concept of what I call the Nollyverse, the Nollywood world. Different story, same world, same mechanics.

Of course there were risks. When we got the funding, I had irrational fears like, what if the short is bad? Does that doom the feature? I had to beat that back, believe we were on the right track, and that everybody on the team believed in it. Taking that risk has really been rewarded by the film we now have.

I was very aware of this from the start of the feature, back in 2021, that I need this to be a love letter, an homage, not a parody. I'm trying to show that there was something special in what we were doing back then. Having that as the intention before you even start really becomes your North Star; you can call back to it whenever you're making decisions about the script, the directing, the music, whatever.

Every programmer's note or review we've received describes it as a love letter, full of heart, and that was the goal. Even bringing collaborators on board, I told them: your love and you pouring yourself into this is more important to me than technical talent. I need to know you love this. I think when you watch the film, it reads as people who truly respect and love Nollywood.

The short, in Kaelo's view, is only the opening note.

If you've seen The Spectacular Death of Prisca, you've seen the tip of the iceberg. It's also a mother-daughter relationship at its heart, but it's a story about grief, about loss, about finding yourself again, the way I found myself with film, even after straying off for so long.

It's about a daughter who, on the anniversary of her mother's passing, is sucked into this Nollyverse again, and it allows her to process everything she's refused to process. There's a chance she could find her mother in this world and bring her back. I feel like anybody would take that chance.

And when do we get to see it? "As soon as somebody gives me one million dollars."

I have to be biased and say Abuja Connection, the film referenced in Prisca. But there's an insane body of work from that time. Whether it's the thriller-drama of Living in Bondage, the comedy of One Dollar or Ukwa, or the campus world of Girls Cot, there's so much of an iconic, rich world they were creating. Anyone will find a good laugh or a good cry in there.

The Spectacular Death of Prisca is, in Kaelo's own words, "this quirky, weird, unhinged story that isn't waiting for permission", made, he hopes, as proof that Nigerian filmmakers don't need to fit a mould to be seen. TIFF platformed it. Now he's hoping the rest of the industry is watching too.

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