There is a moment in Banana Island Ghost where Patrick, already dead, sits in a boat with God. He is in transition, caught between what he was and what he is now being asked to become, and it is here, suspended on water between worlds, that he receives his assignment.
The scene is quiet, unhurried, and slightly absurd in the best way. God does not arrive with thunder. The instruction is not a commandment. It comes as a near-misquotation: “With great responsibility comes great expectation.” A deliberate echo of a line everyone in the audience knows, bent just enough to carry its own meaning. The sacred slips into the frame without asking permission.
That moment, small as it is inside a film built on comedy, is the key to understanding what BB Sasore does as a filmmaker. His instinct is not to separate the divine from the ordinary but to find the place where they share the same room. Across his four directed works, from the Africa Magic series Before 30 to the AMVCA-winning Breath of Life, he keeps returning to characters whose lives have been broken open by loss, and who must find, often without wanting to, something larger moving through the wreckage.
BB Sasore by his own admission, not a particularly religious man. He has called his faith-based films strategic business decisions. Yet the work keeps insisting on something. A filmmaker who can construct this kind of spiritual weight without devotion driving him is operating from a place of precision. He is building architecture, and the light comes in anyway.
Before 30 (2015)
Creator and Director | Africa Magic | Starring: Damilola Adegbite, OC Ukeje, Beverly Naya, Meg Otanwa, Anee Icha
Before 30 is the odd one out in Sasore’s filmography, and that is precisely what makes it worth looking at carefully. The Africa Magic series follows four young Lagos women navigating the one deadline that Nigerian culture has decided matters above all others: marriage before thirty. Temi, a successful lawyer whose boyfriend asks for a break instead of proposing. Nkem, Aisha, Ama. Four women, four different relationships to the same pressure, all of them living inside a city that has already decided who they are supposed to be by the time they arrive.
What Sasore builds here is a grounded social drama interested in how expectation functions as a structural force, how families, friendships, and social circles become quiet enforcement mechanisms for a timeline nobody agreed to but everyone is expected to follow. The blend of humour and introspective drama that the series works in is light on its feet, but the discomfort it is poking at is real. Aisha’s marriage to Sheriff, a man with old-fashioned values and a controlling streak, carries the series’ sharpest social observations, the small grievances and larger moral dilemmas of a woman whose choices are perpetually subject to someone else’s approval.
What Before 30 reveals about Sasore as a writer is his eye for social pressure as a storytelling engine. The faith preoccupations that would define his feature films are largely absent here. Temi is described as spiritual, but that is a character detail, not a thematic concern. The series is doing something different: it is watching women exist inside systems that have already made decisions about them, and finding the drama in how they push back, comply, or negotiate.
Banana Island Ghost (2017)
Director and Writer | Starring: Chioma “Chigul” Omeruah, Patrick Diabuah, Saheed Balogun, Ali Nuhu, Bimbo Manuel, Tina Mba, Akah Nnani, Uche Jombo, Kemi Lala Akindoju, Dorcas Shola Fapson
“With great responsibility comes great expectation.”
The line lands inside the film as a joke, a deliberate misquotation of the Spider-Man principle most audience already know. But Sasore lets it sit as more than a gag. It is the crux of what Patrick, the ghost, has been given: a second chance, a supernatural assignment, and the weight that comes with both.
Comedy is the genre, but Banana Island Ghost is doing more than it announces. The premise is the kind that requires the audience to surrender logic at the door: Patrick dies in a car accident, negotiates with God for more time on earth, and is assigned three days to find and woo his soulmate, Ijeoma, a woman with three days of her own to raise eighteen million naira and keep her late father’s Banana Island home from the bank. Two deadlines, one ghost, and a woman who cannot see him.
Cinematographer Ola Cardoso shoots Lagos not as the city of hustle and proximity that most Nollywood productions render it, but as a place with genuine visual beauty. Aerial shots over the Ikoyi Link Bridge and the lagoon under Third Mainland Bridge give the film a lightness of perspective, a sense that the story is being watched from above as much as lived from within. The production was praised specifically for how crisply it captured the city’s landmarks, a deliberate choice that lends weight to the supernatural stakes: if the world Patrick is trying to return to is worth seeing, his urgency has texture.
The water motif appears here for the first time in his filmography. It is at the water’s edge that Patrick’s spiritual encounter happens, that the weight of his assignment becomes clear and the film’s tonal register briefly shifts from comedy to something more genuinely moved. Fire appears too, in the accident that kills him, the destructive force that initiates transition. BB Sasore would return to both elements in everything that followed, each time asking them to do slightly different work.
God Calling (2018)
Director and Writer | Starring: Zainab Balogun, Karibi Fubara, Richard Mofe-Damijo, Tina Mba, Nkem Owoh, Onyeka Onwenu, Eku Edewor, Ademola Adedoyin, Patrick Diabuah, Diana Egwuatu
If Banana Island Ghost kept its faith elements at a gentle simmer, God Calling turns the heat up entirely. This is BB Sasore’s most overtly spiritual film, and also the one where the fire motif becomes central rather than incidental. The first thing that becomes clear about God Calling is that the CGI is the film’s co-star. BB Sasore spent four months in pre-production, writing five drafts of the script while simultaneously running VFX tests for the film’s two most ambitious sequences: a suicide attempt on Third Mainland Bridge and an underwater shot. His reasoning was direct:
“In order to feel for someone who is attempting suicide on Third Mainland Bridge, you have to actually see and feel what it is like to attempt suicide on Third Mainland Bridge. That is only possible with VFX.”
The technology is not decoration here. It is emotional infrastructure.
Ola Cardoso returns as director of photography, and the images he produces for God Calling are crisper and more deliberately composed than the more kinetic work in Banana Island Ghost. The cinematographer’s contribution is most visible in the bridge scene, which moves from wide exterior shots of the structure at night to an underwater sequence, Sade beneath the surface, which functions as both literal near-death and spiritual threshold. It is the best single scene Sasore had directed to that point, and it works because of the patience with which it is shot: no rush to resolution, just a woman underwater and the question of what she meets there.
Sade’s story is built on fire. She and her husband Francis lose their child in a house explosion, and what follows is the slow collapse of a life: addiction, estrangement, the dissolution of everything that had made sense before. Sasore’s screenplay here is working in the tradition of the biblical call narrative, a person in ruin receiving a purpose they did not ask for, and the film draws the parallel explicitly, Sade eventually told that God has called her to be the “Mother of Nations.”
Where the script strains is in how it handles the second half of that transformation. Once the divine encounter has been processed, Sade’s journey into redemption is rendered in language that trusts the theology more than it trusts the woman. The character becomes a vessel for the film’s message at the expense of her specific, individual texture.
But the ambition of the first hour is considerable. God Calling was the first Nollywood faith-based film made at this scale, with a budget and cast and technical investment that the genre had not previously seen. BB Sasore’s own description of it as “strategic” does not diminish what it achieved aesthetically. A filmmaker who writes five drafts, plans underwater VFX tests, and spends four months in pre-production for a faith film is not making a devotional. He is making a film that takes its audience seriously.
Breath of Life (2023)
Director and Writer | Starring: Wale Ojo, Chimezie Imo, Genoveva Umeh, Ademola Adedoyin, Sam Dede, Tina Mba, Sambasa Nzeribe
Five years after God Calling, Sasore returned with Breath of Life, and the distance is measurable in every technical and narrative department. This is the film where everything he had been building toward arrived at once: the visual language, the colour grammar, the structural precision, the restraint in how faith is handled. Breath of Life won five awards at the 2024 AMVCAs including Best Movie and Best Director, and was produced at a budget of approximately five hundred thousand dollars with an equal allocation for marketing, making it one of the most expensively mounted Nollywood productions of its era.
Timi is a clergyman who has lost his family to violence, murdered by a gang leader known as Fire Boy, and retreated into a life of isolation on a mountain that looks over an entire community without touching it. He is a man who once spoke sixteen languages and led a congregation, now living inside a house thick with cobwebs and decades of sealed grief. When Elijah, a young houseboy with faith enough for both of them, arrives into his life, the film becomes a study in how a closed person is slowly, patiently opened.
The fire motif appears again, this time as the source of Timi’s wound. Fire Boy is not metaphorical; he is a flesh-and-blood antagonist whose violence initiates the film’s central loss. But BB Sasore does not let fire remain purely destructive here. The film’s movement is toward a rekindling, a return of something that was extinguished, and it earns that return through the accumulation of small, specific moments between Wale Ojo and Chimezie Imo, whose dynamic is the film’s genuine achievement.
The male-to-male relationship at the heart of Breath of Life, the employer-to-employee bond that becomes familial, is something BB Sasore described as deliberately rare in Nollywood. He was right to pursue it. Ojo’s Timi is a masterclass in contained devastation, a man whose whole body carries the weight of what he has lost, and Imo’s Elijah earns every moment of warmth the film allows him. Genoveva Umeh, as Anna, holds her own against both of them, and the romance between her and Elijah never feels forced into the narrative.
The film is set across two time periods, with a 2060 framing device narrated by an elderly Elijah looking back, and the main action unfolding in 1960s Nigeria. Sasore shot in Ibadan, using the city’s natural landscape, lush greenery, open skies, and the New Culture Studio, a historic theatre venue, to create a visual world that feels entirely distinct from the Lagos-default of most Nigerian cinema. Cardoso, back for his third collaboration with Sasore, shoots it all in 6K, and the images have a depth and clarity that function as argument: this story is worth seeing clearly.
The film is not without complications. The period setting, meant to evoke 1960s Nigeria, stumbles in places, modern props and contemporary details slipping into frame in ways that break the atmosphere Sasore works hard to build. Some of the dialogue, particularly in scenes where characters articulate their faith, tips into the kind of theatrical declaration that the film’s visual restraint is trying to move away from. But these are the stumbles of a film that is genuinely reaching, and the reach is what matters. Breath of Life won five awards at the 2024 AMVCAs including Best Movie and Best Director, a recognition that felt less like the industry celebrating a winner and more like it acknowledging what quality looks like when someone insists on it.
The most studied of BB Sasore’s technical choices in Breath of Life is his colour grammar. Timi, the film’s protagonist, a gifted clergyman whose family is murdered by a gang leader called Fire Boy, retreats into grief and wears black continuously from the day of the murders until the day Elijah enters his life. The costumes shift as Timi does. Once Elijah arrives, Timi’s shirts begin to lighten, and the film’s backdrop, the walls of his mountain home, the skies outside, follows the same trajectory from shadow toward colour. It is a technique used by very few Nollywood filmmakers with this kind of consistency, embedding the character’s emotional arc inside the visual palette so that the audience feels the change before the dialogue announces it.
The props carry equal weight. Elijah’s tie, given to him by Timi, functions as the film’s central symbol of belonging. When Elijah leaves it at Anna’s house after being called a church rat, the gesture communicates an entire internal monologue without a word: he is telling himself he deserves more than where he has been placed. Sasore the screenwriter trusts the object to do the work that lesser scripts would assign to dialogue. The score operates on a similar principle: sparse, deployed only when the emotional charge has already been built, so that when the music arrives it feels earned rather than instructive.
Structurally, Breath of Life is Sasore’s most sophisticated screenplay. The non-linear timeline, the narrator’s hindsight, the way information is withheld and then released at precisely the moment of maximum impact, all reflect a writer who has learned to control pace as a form of dramatic argument. The employer-to-employee dynamic between Timi and Elijah, which becomes familial without any single scene announcing the shift, is the film’s true achievement.
Wale Ojo plays Timi as a man whose entire body carries the weight of thirty years of sealed grief: still, contained, speaking in precise and limited sentences. Chimezie Imo’s Elijah is the opposite force, warm and capacious, someone whose faith is not a doctrine but a disposition. Their chemistry is the engine the film runs on.
The Recurring Elements
Seen together, BB Sasore’s films share more than a production company and a filmmaker’s name. They share a set of preoccupations that return in different registers across different genres, like a composer revisiting the same motif in different keys. Across Before 30, Banana Island Ghost, God Calling, and Breath of Life, certain craft decisions appear too consistently to be coincidental.
The cinematography of Ola Cardoso is a through-line in the feature films, and his presence matters. He understands what BB Sasore needs from an image: not the frenetic, close-in energy of Nollywood action cinema, but a composed, considered frame that gives the spiritual and emotional stakes room to breathe. His lighting is praised across all three films, and his willingness to attempt technically difficult shots, the underwater sequence in God Calling, the aerial landscape work in Banana Island Ghost, the period Ibadan vistas in Breath of Life, reflects a DP willing to serve ambitious material.
Fire initiates everything. The car accident that kills Patrick. The house explosion that takes Sade’s child. The gang violence of Fire Boy that murders Timi’s family. In each case, fire is not punishment but rupture, the event that breaks a world open and forces the question of what a person becomes once what they were built around is gone. BB Sasore does not use fire as metaphor in a heavy-handed way. He uses it structurally, as the narrative ignition that makes everything else necessary.
Water is the answer fire forces. Patrick in the boat with God. Sade beneath the surface of the bridge. The lush waterways of Ibadan framing Timi’s slow emergence from grief. Water in Sasore’s films functions as the space of encounter, of threshold, of possibility. His characters do not find resolution in water. They find permission to continue.
Loss is the entry point, not the subject. BB Sasore has said in interviews that the recurrence of loss in his work was “purely coincidental.” Whether or not that is true, it is structurally consistent: his films begin in the aftermath of grief and use it as the condition that makes a character available to something larger. The grief is not what the films are about. It is what the films move through.
Purpose is the real subject. He has said this directly: he is fascinated by “purpose and how much exogenous factors such as culture and religion affect our choices.” Every Sasore protagonist is a person whose sense of purpose has been disrupted, either by social pressure (Before 30), supernatural assignment (Banana Island Ghost), personal tragedy (God Calling, Breath of Life), and the films follow them toward the moment where purpose reasserts itself. The sacred is simply the name for the force doing the reasserting.
That a non-religious filmmaker keeps making films about faith so honestly is the most interesting thing about BB Sasore. He is not bearing witness. He is constructing, deliberately and with considerable technical skill, the conditions under which the sacred becomes visible. The fact that he admits this freely does not make the work less sincere. If anything, it makes it more precise. He knows exactly what he is building. The question, film by film, is whether the architecture is strong enough to hold what he is asking it to carry.
And across all of it runs the recurring interest in faith not as certainty but as motion, as the act of moving toward something you cannot see from where you are standing. BB Sasore’s characters do not arrive at faith; they are pushed into the vicinity of it by loss, by grief, by the collapse of the ordinary lives they had built. What they find there is not always comfort. Sometimes it is clarity. Sometimes it is simply the next step.
So far, it mostly is. What film of BB Sasore’s has stayed with you? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
