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Screenwriter Brooks Eti-Inyene opens up about penning Africa's first Kava Original and why Nollywood writers deserve better
Brooks Eti-Inyene has spent the better part of this year working quietly on some of the biggest projects of her career, but none, she says, has meant as much to her as A Mama Deola Wedding Story, the film that took a beloved skit character and turned her into the centerpiece of a full feature.
In a new interview, the screenwriter opened up about the process behind the project, the personal stakes involved, and what she believes the industry still gets wrong about writers like her.
Adapting Mama Deola, a character many already knew from short online skits, into a story that could sustain a feature-length film was no small task. Eti-Inyene wrote the entire script alone, juggling a large ensemble cast and a story built around family and comedy, something she says pushed her further than any project she'd tackled in her two years of professional writing.
It was only partway through the process that she learned the film would carry historic weight as Africa's first Kava Original, a detail she says wasn't part of the conversation when she first signed on.
Much of her attention during the writing process went into preserving a secondary love story between the parents of the film's young couple, a thread she fought to keep alongside the central romance.
She explained that weddings tend to make people reflect on their own relationships, and she wanted the older couple's reconciliation, built around themes of forgiveness and past mistakes, to carry as much emotional weight as the primary storyline.
Whether audiences picked up on that layered structure, she says, remains one of the things she's proudest of in the finished film.
Despite the project's milestone status and the attention it has drawn online, Eti-Inyene says she deliberately avoids reading audience reactions, not out of protest but simply because she's already moved on.
By the time the film released in September, she had written three additional feature films and two television projects, having finished the original script back in June.
She credits an early film school lesson with shaping that mindset, the idea that a story must be released from a writer's hands once it's complete, regardless of how it's received.
That detachment doesn't extend to how she views the state of screenwriting in Nigeria more broadly.
She was blunt about the financial realities writers face, arguing that despite being essential to every film made, screenwriters remain underpaid and under-recognized, and she urged fellow writers to stop waiting for acknowledgment and start demanding fair compensation.
Looking ahead at the industry's shifting power structure, Eti-Inyene pointed to skit makers as a group increasingly positioned to reshape Nollywood, citing their built-in audiences and growing crossover into film and executive production roles. She named several current examples of that trend already taking shape across the industry.
As for what's next, she revealed she's currently writing content for Akwa Ibom's state anniversary program, contributing to the upcoming Africa Magic series Fragments, and developing an independent short film before the year is out.
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