Last night in London, a film about Lagos in 1993 won a BAFTA. The election it was made about is still being contested.

Last night at London's Royal Festival Hall, Wunmi Mosaku won Best Supporting Actress at the BAFTA Film Awards for her role in Sinners. She's the first Black British woman to win that prize at the BAFTA film awards. Born in Nigeria, raised in Manchester, she said after the ceremony that the role let her reconnect with parts of her identity she'd previously felt pressure to suppress.

An hour earlier, My Father's Shadow won Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. Directed by Akinola Davies Jr. and written with his brother Wale Davies, it's a film about a father and his two sons walking through Lagos on the day the 1993 presidential election was annulled. The father knows what's happening. The boys don't quite. The military makes its announcement. The café erupts. They try to get home.

The film premiered at Cannes last May, screened in Nigerian cinemas in September, and won its BAFTA last night. 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Davies Jr. has described it as a tribute to their late father.

Nigeria held an election on Saturday. The legal framework governing how those results were transmitted and counted was just signed into law this week. The argument at the centre of that argument — whether human discretion in the collation chain can be trusted, whether the space between a polling unit count and a declared result is safe — is the same argument that's been running since 1993.

The Davies brothers made a film about their father's last day in Lagos before everything changed. It won a British award in 2026. The thing it was made about is still unresolved.

Some stories don't have endings. Some just keep getting retold.