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Kunle Afolayan says he has ploughed more than N8 billion of his personal wealth into building his film village, and he's now calling on government agencies to step in and support the creative industry the way private investors like himself have.
The acclaimed filmmaker made the revelation while speaking with former Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun on the Nidacity podcast, an episode uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday.
Afolayan traced the origins of the project back to the production of his 2022 film Anikulapo, when he and his team ran into a serious logistics problem: there simply wasn't enough accommodation to house the cast and crew.
According to him, the situation got so difficult that stars like Sola Sobowale and Bimbo Ademoye had to carry personal items from their own homes just to get through the shoot, since proper lodging wasn't available on location.
That experience, he explained, became the push he needed to build something permanent. He ended up constructing 100 rooms as part of what is now known as his film village.
But the financial commitment didn't stop at accommodation. Afolayan said running the facility has been an expensive undertaking, largely because of Nigeria's unreliable power supply.
With no steady electricity connection, he's had to depend heavily on diesel generators, a cost he says has run into millions of naira. In an attempt to find a more sustainable option, he also invested N200 million in a solar power system, but by his own account, even that hasn't been enough to fully solve the energy problem.
Despite the scale of his investment, Afolayan says government support has been absent. He used the podcast appearance to make a direct appeal to relevant government agencies, urging them to back private players in the creative sector who are already putting their own resources on the line to build infrastructure the industry badly needs.
The film village itself sits in Igbojaye, Oyo State, and has become a working production hub for several of Afolayan's projects.
It first gained wider attention through Anikulapo, the Netflix film that premiered in September 2022 with a cast led by Kunle Remi, Bimbo Ademoye, Sola Sobowale and Taiwo Hassan.
The story later grew into a full series, AnÃkúlápó: Rise of the Spectre, which debuted in March 2024, followed by a second season,
The Ghoul Awakens, released on Netflix in January 2026. That latest installment took the narrative beyond the Oyo Kingdom into new territory, with Ademoye and Sobowale returning alongside fresh faces added to the cast much of it shot, once again, at the same film village Afolayan built out of necessity years earlier.
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