In 2014, the world gave the Chibok girls a hashtag. In 2026, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Joel ‘Kachi’ Benson gives their mothers a legacy withMothers of Chibok.
Executive-produced by veteran actress Joke Silva, opened in Nigerian cinemas on February 27 and is now showing across Nigeria and Ghana through the end of March, distributed by FilmOne Entertainment in what is the widest theatrical release ever achieved by a locally produced Nigerian documentary.
The film’s official premiere took place on Saturday, February 28 at Filmhouse IMAX, Lekki Phase 1, Lagos, drawing media, industry leaders, and community voices into direct conversation with the women at the centre of the story. The evening opened with a welcome address by Femi Odugbemi, director of the iREP International Documentary Film Festival, who described the occasion as “a historic moment.”
“What Kachi has done with this film is something far more powerful,” Odugbemi told the audience. “He has restored humanity where the world once saw only statistics.” The address set the tone for an evening that was as much cultural reckoning as it was cinema. Odugbemi, who had previously praised the film as “artistically stunning” when it made its debut at iREP 2025, underscored the film’s central achievement: “It does not sensationalise pain. It dignifies it.”
Mothers of Chibok follows four women, Yana Galang, Lydia Yama, Ladi Lawan, and Maryam Maiyanga, through a single farming season in Borno State, nearly a decade after Boko Haram’s mass abduction of schoolgirls from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in April 2014. There are no dramatic reconstructions of that night. Instead, Benson trains his camera on the quiet, gruelling rhythms of planting groundnuts, waiting for rain, and reaping, using the farming cycle as a sustained metaphor for perseverance: hope, like groundnuts, must be cultivated with calloused hands.
The four mothers till the land with hoes and machetes, channelling their earnings into the education of their remaining children. The film captures moments of communal prayer, muted celebrations when news arrives of returned girls, and the women’s refusal to discard their absent daughters’ belongings. It is a portrait of enterprise and maternal leadership, not victimhood.
Benson is, by now, a figure of considerable significance in African nonfiction cinema. In 2025, he became the first Nigerian , and the first African, to win a Primetime Emmy for directing a documentary, receiving the award for Outstanding Arts and Culture Documentary for his film Madu. His earlier VR work, Daughters of Chibok (2019), won the Venice Immersive award and offered an immersive journey into grief. Mothers of Chibok is its feature-length successor and its tonal opposite: where the earlier work plunged viewers into loss, this one insists on forward motion.
The film won the Al Jazeera Best African Feature Documentary award at the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival in 2025, and received widespread critical acclaim following its iREP debut. Its meditative pacing , what one reviewer has called “contemplative silence,” may challenge shorter attention spans, but it rewards patient viewers with profound intimacy. Benson’s lens looks these women in the eye and frames them not as passive victims of a decade-old terror, but as the economic and emotional backbone of their community.
The involvement of Joke Silva, one of Nigeria’s most respected actors and cultural figures, as executive producer brings both prestige and purpose to the project. Her decision to lend her name and stewardship to Mothers of Chibok reflects a long-held conviction that storytelling is a form of civic engagement. She has described the documentary as “an act of necessary remembrance,” one that reframes the Chibok narrative through the resilience and leadership of the mothers themselves. Her involvement has also been credited with helping secure the film’s unprecedented theatrical distribution footprint across West Africa.
The premiere evening was designed with intention. Guests arrived at four o’clock for an intimate gathering with the Chibok mothers themselves, an opportunity to meet the women featured in the film and sample a curated tasting of their handcrafted groundnut produce. Media interviews followed at Tash Restaurant before the screening began at six.
In his welcome address, Odugbemi drew the audience’s attention to the political weight of cinema itself: “There is enormous power in this film. The power of proximity, because we sit with these women. The power of testimony, because they speak for themselves. And the power of cinema, because film can hold complexity in a way headlines never could.”
For Nigerian cinema, the release carries broader significance. The documentary sector has long struggled to command theatrical space dominated by commercial fiction features. That Mothers of Chibok has achieved the widest ever theatrical rollout for a Nigerian documentary signals something shifting in Nollywood’s self-understanding: a growing recognition that the nation’s most cinematic stories are not always found in scripts, but in the lived realities of its people.
The film’s reach extends beyond Nigeria. With simultaneous screenings in Ghana through the end of March, Mothers of Chibok is arriving in West African cinemas as a regional cultural event, one that insists that Chibok is not merely a Nigerian story, but a pan-African one.
Odugbemi closed his address with a challenge to all who witnessed the film: “May we have the courage to look into it.” It is a challenge Mothers of Chibok earns, and one it honours, with extraordinary grace.
