🥤Rounding Up on Art Week Lagos

November 13, 2026 | Read online

👋 Good afternoon! November in Lagos is still serving culture by the plateful, and this week we swapped the gallery walls for the big screen. We caught a private screening of One Woman One Bra, the Kenyan-Nigerian film that’s been winning over festival audiences from London to New York, and now it’s Kenya’s pick for the Oscars. It’s funny, moving; I’ll let you find out the rest. Grab a snack (popcorn optional) and let’s get into it.

In This Edition: This Week in Culture, Victor Ehindero is Building Skincare Products for Melanin-Rich Skin, Give One Woman One Bra the Audience Award, Everywhere, and more.

If you’re enjoying this, don’t forget to subscribe and join The Juice community. We’re building this together ♡.

Shalom Tewobola,
Editor.

🗞️ THIS WEEK IN CULTURE

🎵 MUSIC

Some of your faves are dropping new music very soon, so clear your playlists. First up is Olamide, whose 13th studio album, Time & Space, arrives on November 16. Then Rema follows on November 20 with E-Mortal Boy (EMB), a new seven-track EP that features Wizkid.

For us, they’re the perfect soundtracks to close out the year. Olamide is going for a more focused 10-track project after last year’s star-studded self-titled album, while EMB is Rema’s first EP since Ravage in 2023. Both releases give us a fresh look at where two of our biggest artists are taking their sound next.

📽️ FILM

The Lagos International Theatre Festival is happening on the 14th and 15th of this month at the MUSON Centre, Lagos. Theatre is where film begins, so we’re excited. One of the productions, Monkey Laundry, features none other than Nollywood’s lover boy, Uzor Arukwe.

For us, it’s a chance to watch great storytelling up close, without retakes or editing. It’s also a reminder that many of the actors we love on screen sharpened their craft on stage. Supporting theatre means supporting the talent, stories and creativity that keep our film industry growing.

📚 LITERATURE

It’s officially one week until the Aké Festival! Dust off your books, gather your questions and get ready to meet the African authors moving the literary space forward.

Beyond the book signings and selfies, Aké is a chance to hear writers talk about their craft, swap ideas with fellow readers and leave inspired. This year’s theme, Native Intelligence, asks what human knowledge and imagination we must protect in a world increasingly shaped by AI. It’s a conversation worth being in the room for.

⚽SPORTS

Praise Ugoh has made history at the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games, becoming the first Nigerian woman to win gold in the 400m. The 16-year-old sprinter clocked a personal best of 52.76 seconds to take the title, edging out Venezuela’s Osmary Pacheco (52.85s) and the UAE’s Aisha Mohammed (53.06s).

Her win is about more than one medal. It’s Nigeria’s third gold at these Games, making Dakar 2026 the country’s best Youth Olympics campaign yet, at the first edition ever held on African soil.

⚡TRENDING

In a razz turn of events yesterday, suspected thugs attacked supporters of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) at a town hall meeting in Oregun, Lagos. Armed with cutlasses and stones, they tried to force their way into the venue, but supporters fought back, chased them off the premises, and caught at least one of them.

The incident is a worrying sign as campaigns for 2027 heat up. Political rallies and town halls should be safe spaces where people can hear from candidates and make informed choices, not places where they risk their lives.

MAIN SQUEEZE

Victor Ehindero is Building Skincare Products for Melanin-Rich Skin

“Most brands sell you a promise. At Potio, we sell a result you can see in your mirror.”

Victor Ehindero kept hearing the same complaint from friends in Ibadan: they were spending money on imported skincare products and still struggling with dark marks, breakouts, and other skin concerns.

He began to wonder whether the problem was the products themselves, and whether they understood the skin they were being sold to. So, in December 2025, he launched Potio Beauty, a skincare brand built with African skin and its needs in mind.

But Victor is also making a statement beyond the products. He is the face of his brand, appearing in campaigns and product demonstrations in a market where men who take skincare seriously can still be dismissed as vain or 'too soft'.

For him, skincare has little to do with gender and everything to do with understanding what your skin needs.

Now, with more than 8,000 customers, Victor is building a case for a skincare industry that takes African consumers seriously. After all, African skin shouldn't have to be an afterthought.

You came from media, advertising, and WhatsApp marketing. How did that background help you more than a chemistry degree would have?

When I started my career, I started in marketing & advertising because of my natural flair for communities and interactions. This path is the single most influential decision I have made because that background affected how I approached every other project we rolled out. The core of every business, project, and brand is the people in it. Paying customers, return customers, and Lifetime customers.

The ability to convert people who never knew about a product to falling in love with it and becoming absolutely loyal to it is why I will continue to appreciate the media & advertising background. You just understand people; you can speak their language, and they can also understand your messages. That in itself is the true power of a background like mine.

Before Potio existed, you kept watching the people around you reach for imported skincare that wasn't made for their skin or for Ibadan's heat. What was the moment you stopped being annoyed by that and decided to fix it yourself?

I’m a very social person, and that means I have a lot of friends and acquaintances. At some point in life, it felt like everybody was doing the same thing. Most people around me were either working on a defect in their skin or just wanted to start a new routine.

Now all of these people when we talk and catch up, randomly they all just mention they aren’t seeing progress from the foreign brands they are using.

I got this feedback from people around me so much that I knew and told myself, ‘I had to do something about this.’ The fix I created for my friends is what over 8,000+ people are using today.

Made for melanin-rich skin" is a promise a lot of brands make now. What does it mean in the formulation, and how would a customer know it's real and not just marketing language?

Melanin-rich skin tends to hold on to marks. A pimple, a bit of irritation, and what’s left behind can last for months.

That’s why we build around hyperpigmentation first: HYDRATE carries 5% niacinamide, a well-studied active for uneven tone. CLARIFY exfoliates without stripping. RESTORE is there to fade marks that are already there.

We don’t ask customers to take our word for it. Our ingredient lists are open, every product has a clear job, and we show real results on real skin. Because proof matters more than promises. Anyone can put the phrase on a label. For we at Potio, We’d rather earn it.

More than 8,000 customers in nine months is a strong start. What is one thing those customers taught you that you couldn't have learned from research or a pitch deck?

What no pitch deck could teach me is how much weight the product itself carries. People can try Potio once. Only the product gets them to come back. We’ve had customers come back and tell us their skin looks better, and that is worth more to us than anything else.

It changed how I run the business. Every naira has to protect the quality of what’s in the bottle first because in skincare the product is the brand.

Nigerians are famously suspicious of new local products, especially in beauty. What did it take to earn the first hundred customers' trust, and what does it take to keep customer number 8,001?

The suspicion is normal. Nigerians have been affected by products that promised clear skin and delivered nothing, so a new brand has to earn trust the hard way.

Most beauty brands try to win it with big claims. For us, we did the opposite. We made the product show its work. Every formula was built around the problems our customers actually have. From acne marks to uneven tone in our climate and on our skin.

100 customers trusted us because the product did what we said. Customer 8,001 trusts us for the same reason and because we don’t change the rules on them. Same quality, same honesty, every bottle. Most brands sell a promise. For us at Potio, we sell a result you can see in your mirror.

🔪 THE PEEL

Give One Woman One Bra the Audience Award, Everywhere

If November were a holiday, it would be Christmas for the Lagos art scene. So much is happening that it's easy to get overwhelmed and miss most of it (as I did).

There are the big names, like ART X Lagos, the Lagos Fringe Festival, AFRIFF and CANEX. There are smaller moments too: exhibitions at Tiwani Contemporary and Adegbola Gallery, and archives and events at the J. Randle Centre. Somewhere in the city, something is always opening.

Yesterday, despite the terrible state of ride-hailing in Lagos, I made it to a private screening of One Woman One Bra at EbonyLife Place. It was a warm, intimate gathering, and in this piece I want to unpack what made it so enjoyable.

A woman, a village

One Woman One Bra is a Kenyan-Nigerian co-production, written and directed by Kenyan filmmaker Vincho Nchogu and produced by Nigerian filmmaker Josh Olaoluwa. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it was developed under the Venice Biennale College programme.

The story is set in Sayit, a fictional Maasai village where the villagers are about to receive title deeds, marking the first time in centuries they will legally own their land. For most people, that's good news. For Star, it's a crisis.

She is a 38-year-old unmarried woman with no knowledge of her parentage. With no husband and no kin to vouch for her, she has to figure out how to claim her home and land, either by proving a family connection or raising enough funds. So she schemes. She tries to raise money. She even tries to fake a marriage.

Watching it, I didn't fully grasp how close to reality this was until the Kenyan woman sitting next to me leaned over and explained that this is simply how things work there.

For generations, land ownership in the Maasai community was reserved for men, and women could neither own nor inherit it. Married women depended on their husbands for access to land, whether to farm, graze or build a home.

After independence, much of Maasailand was organised into collectively owned group ranches. When these were later carved up into individual plots, the process favoured those with a say in decision-making and left women, young people and poorer herders more vulnerable.

Coming of age at 38

That is why a story about land becomes a story about identity, and in a way, a coming-of-age story too, even though Star is 38. Each journey she takes in search of money or kin forces her to answer a bigger question: who is she when no one claims her?

It reminded me of Kaelo Iyizoba's The Spectacular Death of Prisca, which also follows an older woman coming of age and learning to see herself beyond the roles others gave her.

Nchogu has said this directly. She wanted to make a film about a woman who doesn't carry the titles society places on her.

Making it in the middle of nowhere

The film's power owes a lot to where and how it was made. It was shot in Loita and rooted in Maasai life, in a remote area with no electricity and no hotels, so the crew had to bring everything in themselves.

Their director of photography, Muhammad Atta Ahmed, suggested they lean into natural light, and that choice produced some of the most beautiful images I've seen on screen.

The location was deliberate. Nchogu said she wanted a place so stunning that audiences would understand why Star fights so hard to stay, even though her neighbours aren't friendly. It worked. Watching those wide, golden landscapes, I understood why Star would rather fight than leave a home she has no official claim to.

The cast is made up largely of non-professional actors from the community, and you can tell. But that gives the film its own kind of beauty: they don't seem to be performing so much as being themselves. Sarah Karei, who plays Star, had never acted before, and yet she won Best Actress at AFRIFF and earned a special jury mention at the 2026 Tribeca Festival.

One scene in particular moved me deeply. Star delivers a climactic monologue about identity and about having no one to stand up for her. During the speech, some of the extras, who were real villagers, were wiping away tears. And in that moment, the line between actor and character disappeared.

The Music

During the Q&A, Nchogu said a scene should make you feel something before the music comes in, and that she always asks whether a scene could work without it. The score is used sparingly, and that gives the film an almost documentary feel.

I should be honest about my bias here. I'm not usually drawn to films that put an indigenous community on screen with a few foreigners sprinkled in, or to films that seem built around the scars of colonialism. This inspired me to write about why African films seem to be expected to be heavy in order to succeed at international festivals.

One Woman One Bra has every ingredient of that kind of film, including the well-meaning NGO workers who handed out bras to the Sayit community. But the film isn't heavy. The cinema hall kept filling with laughter, and yet the film never lost its seriousness.

In an interview with Nollywood Reporter, Olaoluwa said, "If you're familiar with Vincho's past work, she has a sense of humor that is very unique. It does not take away from the subject matter." He's right. The humour is the point. It lets the film mock the outsiders’ gaze without turning Star into a victim.

Festival audiences seem to agree. The film won the Sutherland Award for Best First Feature at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival, picked up 14 nominations at the Africa Movie Academy Awards, and is Kenya's official selection for the Best International Feature category at the Oscars. At Tribeca, it also took first place for the Audience Award in the narrative category.

The one thing I'd change

If I could change one thing, it would be the title. I understand the choice. It's witty and sarcastic towards how the colonialists think about Africans. But Star's story deserves a title that's about her: an independent woman who simply wants to keep her land and thrive where she can.