Lagos-born, London-based filmmaker Olive Nwosu has premiered her feature-length debut, Lady, in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. The film centres on Lady (Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah), a rare female taxi driver navigating a city of more than 20 million people. Rising fuel prices and a turbulent political climate compound her mounting exhaustion as she attempts to save enough money to leave Lagos for Freetown in Sierra Leone, the birthplace of her mother. When Pinky (Amanda Oruh), a childhood friend who is now a sex worker, re-enters her life with an offer that promises faster earnings, Lady’s solitary routine opens up to a nocturnal sisterhood whose warmth and volatility begin to reshape her sense of autonomy while causing unresolved trauma to resurface.

Nwosu’s work has consistently focused on women negotiating inherited structures. Her earlier shorts Troublemaker and Masquerade approached this tension obliquely through ritual, community and generational memory. Lady narrows its focus to a protagonist hustling within a patriarchal environment, saving money for a future elsewhere and hiding her earnings in a hole inside her single-room, makeshift dwelling.

Nwosu steers clear of the familiar tropes of poverty drama. The cinematography by Alana Mejía González remains energising, while Gabriel’s Ujah anchors the film with an empathy for a character driven by the idea of Freetown as an exit from her present circumstances. When Lady is presented with a proposal to drive sex workers to clients by local pimp and gangster Fine Boy (Bucci Franklin), prompted by Pinky, she resists being manipulated by him. Her refusal to yield establishes terms that Fine Boy ultimately accepts.

Nwosu, who also wrote the screenplay, spaces out the film’s revelations carefully. Gradually, the viewer is given an insight into why her mother’s birthplace functions as a projection of a better life, the source of her resentment towards Pinky, and her aversion to sex work and men more broadly. During nighttime journeys to bookings with wealthy clients, guarded distance gives way to tentative solidarity as new bonds form between Lady and a rag-tag group of rambunctious women. At this point, the film shifts from the initial social-drama setting towards a more concentrated character study, reinforced by cinematographer Gonzalez’s observational framing of the protagonist.

As Lady progresses, it adopts a more vivid colour palette and a heightened visual rhythm. In a pivotal sequence, after repeatedly refusing invitations to join clients’ parties and instead waiting alone in her taxi at night, Lady gives in to curiosity and enters a house. The cinematography becomes increasingly oneiric, marked by rapid editing as long-suppressed childhood trauma surfaces, revealing the origins of her resistance to sex in general. Although this stylised sequence briefly adopts a music video-like aesthetic, the film’s nocturnal passages are more consistently shaped by neo-noir visual influences.

While Nwosu retains her interest in marginalised perspectives and collective female bonds in her debut feature, Lady ultimately brings to the fore a focused character portrait of a woman attempting to assert agency within constrained personal, economic and social circumstances. In the third act, genre elements become more pronounced as the movie shifts towards melodrama, culminating in a self-sacrificial, sentimental resolution shaped by emotional uplift. Although the film draws on familiar narrative beats, including the invocation of the virgin-whore dichotomy, Lady nonetheless signals the emergence of a new voice, grounded in African authorship and attentive to the gendered conditions shaping women’s lives within a patriarchal society, while adopting an audience-orientated form of storytelling.

Lady is a UK-Nigerian co-production staged by Ossian International, and co-produced by Good Gate Media and Emperium Films. Executive producers are Level Forward, the BFI, Film4, Screen Scotland and Amplify. Its world sales are handled by HanWay Films.