Nollywood has spent decades insisting that Nigerian stories deserve global attention. However, the only stories we see are those that are commercially viable.

Our stories include the young men and women killed by mobs. They include people who disappeared into the machinery of a broken system. They include police officers accused of abuses of power. They include political violence, communal conflict, military rule, corruption, religious tensions, failed institutions and the countless families left behind when the headlines disappear. Most importantly, they include the civil war.

The Night of June 7th, produced by Linda Ikeji, therefore arrives as more than another Nollywood release. It is another attempt to drag a forgotten chapter of Nigeria’s past back into public consciousness. And perhaps that is the real significance of Linda Ikeji’s intervention.

She may not have solved Nollywood’s long-standing problem of historical storytelling. She may not always get everything right. Indeed, Dark October itself attracted criticism over both its filmmaking and its handling of the Aluu Four story. One review argued that the film did not go deep enough despite the extraordinary strength of its subject matter.

At least she is looking at Nigeria’s history and asking whether the people who lived through these tragedies deserve to have their stories remembered beyond newspaper archives, social-media posts and old YouTube videos.

Because a country that forgets its difficult stories eventually forgets why those stories mattered. And while Nollywood continues to promise that it will “tell our stories”, Linda Ikeji appears to be doing something much simpler and taking the cinemas step by step.

Who tells the story of September 2020

Perhaps Linda Ikeji’s next story should literally be called “September 2020”, a film or limited series about the events leading into the #EndSARS killings and the wider crisis of police brutality that exploded across Nigeria in 2020. There is an extraordinary story sitting there, waiting to be properly told.

Not simply a film about a protest, and not another two-hour retelling of the Lekki events, but a carefully researched historical drama that begins before the protests became a global hashtag: the young Nigerians who had spent years experiencing SARS, the families whose sons never came home, the social-media generation that turned individual grievances into a national movement, the government announcements, the protests, the violence, the deaths and the competing narratives that followed.