NollywoodWeek opens in Paris on Wednesday and runs until May 10. Two films in this year's selection are worth knowing about before you hear about them elsewhere.

The festival has run for over a decade. It is one of the more serious international platforms Nigerian film has outside Nigeria.

This year's selection includes Ema Edosio-Deelen's When Nigeria Happens, following a group of street dancers trying to hold their dreams together as the realities of survival test everything between them. Also selected is a Yoruba-language drama centred on a community whose king dies and whose youngest wife, now a Christian convert, refuses the traditional burial ritual, forcing a confrontation between two systems that have been quietly coexisting until they can't.

Both films are doing what Nollywood rarely gets credit for abroad. Not scale. Not spectacle. Specific, irresolvable human situations. The kind that don't come with a clean ending because they're drawn from lives that don't have one.

A Nigerian film festival in Paris this week is also a negotiation that runs underneath the screenings. Who tells these stories. Who distributes them. Who profits from them. The diaspora audience in Europe is not incidental to that negotiation. In many ways they are the reason it is happening at all.