International Women’s Day Feature
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There are people who enter the film industry with a plan. They study the industry like a map and look for the quickest route to the centre. Then there are people who enter it because they cannot help themselves. They return to the work again and again long before it becomes profitable, long before anyone calls it a career. Blessing Uzzi, founder of BluHouse, belongs firmly to the second group. When she talks to us about how she started, the story carries none of the neat mythology people sometimes attach to creative success. Instead, it begins with something far simpler. “I didn’t start film thinking it would be my career,” she says. “It was just something I loved doing. At the time, I was willing to do it for free because I enjoyed it that much.” What sounds like a casual confession is actually a revealing ethic. The work, for her, arrived first as devotion and only later as profession.
In those early years, Uzzi imagined a future in politics. Film existed somewhere on the margins of that ambition, more a language she enjoyed speaking than a world she planned to live in permanently. But creative callings have a quiet persistence. People around her kept noticing what she had not yet fully admitted to herself. Friends and collaborators began to insist that what she treated as a pastime looked very much like a job. “People kept telling me, ‘You should actually do this full time,’” she remembers. It is a moment many creatives recognize. The hobby begins to feel heavier. The thing you once did casually begins to demand discipline. Over time, the idea of turning away from it feels less and less possible. “Eventually, I began to see it as a calling,” she says.
The next part of the story introduces the element that often transforms passion into profession. Talent alone rarely changes a life. At some point, someone has to believe in you before the evidence is obvious. In Uzzi’s case, that person was musician and producer Cobhams Asuquo. At the time she had never directed a music video. She had no track record in the form and no obvious proof she could deliver the kind of work expected. Yet Asuquo offered her the opportunity anyway. “He gave me my first music video when I had never directed one before,” she says. “He paid me properly and gave me the budget to hire the best people.” That last detail matters because opportunity is only meaningful when it is accompanied by the resources required to succeed. What Asuquo offered her was not simply a chance to attempt something. It was a chance to do the work well.
The decision, she later discovered, was not universally supported. Some people advised him against it. It would have been easy to choose a safer option, someone with a longer résumé or a more predictable reputation. Instead, he trusted instinct and potential. The video was successful and helped introduce Uzzi’s name to a broader creative audience.“It put my name out there,” she says. The experience did more than launch a new phase of her career. It also shaped the way she now thinks about opportunity. When someone takes a risk on you early in your career, the gesture tends to echo long after the project itself is finished.
The momentum from that early opportunity gradually expanded into a body of work that has positioned Uzzi as one of the emerging creative voices working between storytelling and production in Nollywood. Over the years she has moved between directing, writing, and producing projects that explore the textures of contemporary Nigerian life. Among the most notable is the feature film Freedom Way, which she wrote and produced. The film, directed by Afolabi Olalekan, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and later won Best Movie and Best Writing at the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards. Earlier works such as Agwaetiti Obiuto, No Man’s Land, and the short film 9:07 helped establish her presence as a filmmaker interested in the intersection of human relationships, social systems, and political tension. Across these projects runs a consistent curiosity about how ordinary people navigate structures of power, expectation, and survival. Rather than chasing spectacle, Uzzi’s work often leans toward grounded narratives and character driven tension, allowing stories to unfold through atmosphere and lived experience.
Ask Uzzi about what she has contributed to the industry since then and she does not rush to define it. In fact, she seems slightly wary of the question. “I’m always uncomfortable when people ask that,” she says. “I prefer to just do my part and let other people decide what the contribution is.” Yet it becomes clear that one pattern runs consistently through her professional life. She believes opportunities should circulate. Early in her career she often collaborated with creatives whose work she admired, offering time, creative space, or access whenever she could. Some of these gestures might appear small from the outside, the kind of things the industry sometimes dismisses as exposure. But her intention was always different. “I did a lot of things people would call exposure,” she explains. “But it was for people I loved and respected, people whose work I believed in.”
What she has watched over time is the way creative generosity accumulates. The collaborators she supported in those early years are now established artists in their own right. They bring experience, connections, and value back into the networks they once shared as beginners. “Some of those things are paying off now,” she says. The return rarely appears in a direct transaction. Instead, it emerges gradually as relationships deepen and careers grow. In creative industries, this circulation of trust often determines which communities thrive and which collapse into competition.
When the conversation turns to women entering the film industry, Uzzi speaks with clarity and practicality. She avoids abstract slogans and instead focuses on the behaviour that opens doors. “Women should seek every opportunity they can find,” she says. “Don’t reserve yourself from any role.” Film sets still carry traces of old assumptions about who belongs in certain departments. Lighting, sound, and other technical positions have historically been seen as male territory. But Uzzi points out that the landscape is changing. “There are female gaffers now,” she says. The point is not simply representation. It is permission. Women entering the industry must often grant themselves the authority to occupy spaces that tradition once discouraged them from entering.
Still, ambition alone is not enough. Uzzi emphasizes the importance of visible work. Creative industries tend to reward people who demonstrate their skills rather than those who simply announce them. “If you say you can compose music for film, record something,” she says. “Put it on SoundCloud. Share it. Show people what you can do.” The advice is direct but grounded in reality. Producers and directors are constantly looking for collaborators, but they rarely search blindly. Making your work visible increases the likelihood that someone will recognize its value. “People are always looking to expand their teams,” she adds. “You just have to put yourself out there.”
Beyond opportunity and visibility, Uzzi believes another resource quietly shapes careers in film. That resource is information. One of the moments she remembers most clearly from her early career came from a simple conversation with another female director. Uzzi had been trying to build a business case for investors and needed a benchmark for how much a Nigerian film could realistically sell to a global streaming platform. The industry often treats such numbers as private knowledge. Yet the director shared the information openly. “That piece of information was exactly what I needed,” Uzzi says. With that figure in hand, she was able to present a credible argument to investors about the value of her work. What might have seemed like a small act of honesty had a profound impact on her professional trajectory.
Experiences like that have shaped how she thinks about mentorship. Support does not always require elaborate programmes or formal titles. Sometimes it is simply the willingness to answer a question honestly. “Sometimes giving is just sharing knowledge,” she says. “Maybe telling someone where to apply for a lab or giving them thirty minutes to talk.” For someone navigating an uncertain industry, those brief conversations can be decisive.
Today, Uzzi channels this philosophy through BluHouse, the creative company she leads. The company’s ambitions extend beyond producing projects. She envisions it as a place where talent can emerge and develop. “Our goal is to keep finding talented people and helping them build their dreams,” she says. In practice, that often means working with creators who exist outside traditional pathways. Some may be first time writers. Others may have ideas but lack industry experience. Uzzi is less interested in résumé lines than in clarity of vision. “Sometimes the person with the best idea has never written for film before,” she says. “But if they’re talented and focused, they deserve a chance.”
Looking ahead, she hopes BluHouse will also create spaces where filmmakers can gather, exchange knowledge, and collaborate. Workshops, training sessions, and open conversations are part of the vision. In an industry that still operates with limited formal structure, these informal networks often become the true infrastructure of creative growth.
When Uzzi reflects on this year’s International Women’s Day theme, “give to gain,” she interprets it less as a motivational slogan and more as a description of how creative communities function. “It reminds me of the saying that givers never lack,” she says. Yet the gain she describes is rarely immediate or predictable. The reward for helping someone may not arrive from that person at all. It might appear years later through a different collaboration, a shared opportunity, or the simple strengthening of the industry itself. Creative ecosystems expand when trust moves freely through them.
International Women’s Day often highlights the barriers women have had to overcome in male dominated industries. Uzzi’s story acknowledges those realities but also emphasizes another dimension of progress. Careers are not built only through resilience. They are also built through generosity. The opportunity someone extends to you today can become the opportunity you extend to someone else tomorrow. In that sense, success is not merely about climbing upward. It is about widening the path so that others can walk it too.
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