THE FUSE

The wide, still, often unblinking stare of feature film newcomer Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah burns a hole right through “Lady,” galvanizing the camera and issuing the audience with a challenge to look away first. Few will dare. It’s a deliberately confrontational style of performance and portraiture, fixing all attention on a character that people would, and do, find easier to ignore in real life: a young, working-class black woman living by and for herself on the mean streets of Lagos. As the only female taxi driver working her corner of Nigeria’s heaving metropolis, Lady is accustomed to underestimation by a callous patriarchy, and staunchly resists the gender normatives implied by her name. Olive Nwosu‘s lively, humid debut feature zeroes in on a determined individualist in a city of over 17 million.