International Women’s Day Feature
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Stories rarely arrive in the world fully formed. Before a film reaches a screen, before characters speak their first lines or audiences gather to watch, there is a long period of invisible labour during which someone must first imagine that the story deserves to exist. In industries where access to capital, distribution, and institutional support is uneven, that labour often extends beyond the creative process itself. It includes building belief, constructing networks, and creating the systems that allow storytelling to travel. For many women working in film, particularly within African and diasporic contexts, this work begins long before the camera turns on. The filmmaker must not only shape the narrative but also establish the conditions that allow the narrative to be told at scale.
For filmmaker and entrepreneur Isoken Ogiemwonyi, that broader understanding of storytelling has shaped her approach to creative work across fashion, media, and film. Her career reflects an awareness that cultural production does not exist independently of the systems that sustain it. Stories require audiences, but they also require distribution channels, financial backing, and communities willing to believe in their relevance. In environments where those structures remain fragile or incomplete, creators often find themselves building the architecture of the industry at the same time that they are attempting to produce work within it.
Before entering filmmaking, Ogiemwonyi had already established herself within the world of fashion and creative entrepreneurship. Her early ventures positioned her at the intersection of design, commerce, and cultural storytelling, revealing how visual expression shapes identity and social imagination. Reflecting on the origins of her creative instincts, she explains that her fascination was never limited to clothing or retail itself. “Fashion is my first love,” she says. “I’ve always been fascinated by communication, especially visual communication, and the way style, taste and storytelling shape how people see themselves and the world around them.” What attracted her to fashion was therefore not only its aesthetic dimension but also its narrative capacity. Clothing, presentation, and design function as forms of language through which individuals and communities communicate belonging, aspiration, and identity.
Her ventures—including Zazaii, Le Petit Marché, and L’Espace—became platforms that connected emerging African designers with audiences interested in contemporary African fashion. Running these businesses required skills that later proved equally essential in filmmaking: identifying talent, cultivating audiences, managing creative production, and translating cultural ideas into sustainable enterprises. The work also revealed something fundamental about the African creative economy. Talent often emerges more quickly than the infrastructure required to support it. Entrepreneurs and artists therefore become builders of systems as well as creators of work.
Film eventually became the medium through which Ogiemwonyi could most fully explore storytelling. Unlike fashion, which communicates through symbolism and visual cues, cinema allows narratives to unfold across time, emotion, and character. “Film and long-form media felt like the most complete form of storytelling,” she explains. “It can hold a mirror to society—who we are, who we have been, and who we might become.” Cinema possesses a unique capacity to document cultural realities while simultaneously imagining alternatives. Through film, individual experiences can resonate with audiences far beyond the contexts in which they originate.
Entering the film industry, however, rarely follows a predictable or comfortable path. Ogiemwonyi describes one of the defining decisions of her career as the willingness to abandon the expectation of certainty. “I gave up the safety of a linear path very early,” she explains. “I gave up certainty and the comfort of waiting for permission.” Choosing a creative life often requires accepting ambiguity as a permanent condition. Projects develop slowly, financing remains uncertain, and the path from concept to screen can stretch across years.
The ability to navigate that uncertainty requires both patience and intellectual curiosity. For Ogiemwonyi, curiosity became the driving force that allowed her to move across disciplines and continue building new creative possibilities. “I don’t always know if something will work,” she says. “But I’m intensely curious. When I commit to something, I go deep.” Curiosity in this sense becomes a form of resilience. It encourages experimentation, learning, and adaptation within industries that constantly evolve.
Filmmaking itself demands a particular kind of endurance. Unlike many creative practices that allow for relatively rapid production cycles, cinema unfolds slowly. Development, financing, production, and distribution all require time. “Film is a long game,” Ogiemwonyi explains. “You have to hold the vision for a very long time before the world can actually see it.” During this extended process, the filmmaker must maintain clarity about the story’s identity while navigating feedback, negotiation, and the practical realities of production.
“You have to know the voice of the project so clearly,” she says, “that when people try to turn it into something else, you know how to navigate that.” Maintaining that clarity becomes especially important when storytelling intersects with broader cultural expectations. African narratives are often subject to pressures that encourage simplification or modification for perceived global audiences.
For women filmmakers, these pressures frequently intensify. Ogiemwonyi articulates a reality that many women in the industry recognize immediately. “Women are often building the thing while also proving that it deserves to exist.” The filmmaker must advocate not only for the creative vision of a particular project but also for the cultural legitimacy of the story itself.
This dual responsibility becomes particularly pronounced for Black women working within international media industries. “A lot of women, especially Black women filmmakers, are not only trying to get one project made,” she explains. “We’re working in spaces where the infrastructure around our stories and our audiences is still paper thin.” The work of storytelling therefore expands into advocacy, negotiation, and the gradual construction of professional ecosystems capable of supporting new narratives.
Ogiemwonyi encountered these dynamics directly during conversations with international distributors and industry stakeholders. “Living in Canada, I kept hearing that Nigerian and African stories were too specific,” she recalls. “One distributor even described our audience as ‘statistically insignificant.’” Such assumptions reveal how deeply entrenched misconceptions about global audiences can be. They also illustrate why creators from underrepresented regions often find themselves explaining the value of their stories before those stories are even evaluated on their own merits.
The global reception of The Smart Money Woman offered a powerful counterexample to those assumptions. When the series reached audiences through Netflix, the response extended far beyond the communities for which it had initially been created. Viewers from different cultural contexts recognized elements of their own lives within the show’s portrayal of friendship, ambition, financial independence, and social pressure.
Reflecting on that moment, Ogiemwonyi describes the experience with a mixture of gratitude and surprise. “We were getting messages from all over the world,” she says. “It really felt like a Cinderella moment.” The response reinforced a lesson that many filmmakers working with culturally specific narratives eventually discover: authenticity often enhances universality rather than limiting it.
Over time Ogiemwonyi’s perspective on storytelling expanded beyond the creation of individual projects. “I realized I had something to say not only through the stories themselves,” she explains, “but also about the business, the culture, and the infrastructure around storytelling.” This recognition reflects the mindset of a builder rather than simply a creator. When systems appear incomplete, some artists choose to wait for those systems to evolve. Others begin constructing alternatives themselves.
Looking toward the future, Ogiemwonyi hopes the next generation of women filmmakers will encounter a creative landscape that recognizes the value of their narratives more readily. “I hope they don’t have to spend so much time convincing people that their stories are worthy of scale and investment,” she says. Her vision extends beyond representation toward structural transformation within the industry.
Ultimately, what she hopes younger women gain more quickly than her generation did is something even more fundamental. “More ownership, more scale, more access,” she says. Then she adds the aspiration that frames the deeper purpose behind her work. “More than anything, I hope they get to freedom faster.”
The history of cinema is often written through the films that reach audiences, yet those films represent only the visible surface of a much longer process. Beneath every story that appears on screen lies the labour of individuals who imagined its possibility long before the world believed in it. For filmmakers like Ogiemwonyi, the work has never been limited to directing scenes or writing scripts. It has involved constructing the cultural and economic architecture that allows African stories to travel freely. And if the next generation of women filmmakers reaches that freedom sooner, it will be because someone before them insisted on building the road while walking it.
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