Ifeatu Nnaobi

LGBTQ+ identities are criminalised in 65 countries around the world — the majority of these are in Africa — a result of British colonial legacies and US American Evangelical propaganda.

While some governments (Botswana, Angola, Singapore, Antigua & Barbuda and Barbados) recently moved towards decriminalisation and better protection for LGBTQ+ individuals, others like Uganda and Ghana are tightening or seeking to tighten existing laws.

As the world turns more right-leaning, filmmakers play a crucial role in what’s to come. The screening of Teddy award-winning film, ‘All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White’ at this year’s Afrikamera Festival, and the ensuing conversation held space to challenge the dominant narratives, and discuss mobilisation tactics, in Nigeria, where the film is set, and globally.

Green Party Member of Parliament, Ulle Shauws, has a history in cinema and renowned author, producer, and activist Bisi Alimi also runs a production company, Vengiance Productions and their perspectives were important when dissecting the film’s contribution to the narrative ecology of queerness on the African continent today.

Bisi Alimi emphasised the importance of taking our support for queer rights outside the echo chamber by voting for the right representatives, and financially supporting charities and institutions that advocate for the rights and well-being of LGBTQ+ people.

And I’d love to echo that when thinking about nurturing queer kinship networks, enshrining movement legacies in narratives and building alternative futures tangible enough for us to step into.

Participants at the Rural ICT Camp during an icebreaker session

I was invited to the Rural ICT Camp 2025 to give a workshop on using Wikidata to strengthen community-centred connectivity initiatives with participants from all over Indonesia.

The Rural ICT Camp is an annual event run by the Common Room Networks Foundation(Common Room). The series aims to bridge the digital divide in rural and remote areas, while promoting the development and utilisation of community-based internet networks in Indonesia. It supports internet infrastructure and communication technologies in rural and remote areas that are effective, safe, affordable, and meaningful.

This year’s edition was held in Depok and my workshop was a hands-on tutorial on using Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons as open source tools for collaboratively managing local knowledge production.

A prototype of the sensor developed during previous Rural ICT Camps

The participants were a diverse group; including teachers, university professors and deans, researchers, small business owners and activists. It was a lot of fun to share knowledge about some of my favourite products. We got to upload images, create Wikidata items and start articles on about local communities, important figures, projects, villages and Islands – most importantly in local Indonesia languages.

I especially enjoyed discussing the potential of using Wikibase to house the the weather data that the locally built monitoring stations have been collecting in Pulo Aceh, Maros, Sumba and various other locations across Indonesia.

I hadn’t been able to organize a public screening of my latest short film, “A Portrait of Muhammed” although, it was completed in December 2024, so I was thrilled when Indonesian researcher, curator and artist Vincent Rumahloine offered to screen it as part of a community endeavour in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia.

It was a beautiful way to share the film with local film students and activists, alongside “I Know What You Did Last Summer” by Indonesian film crew Diks Entertainment. It was followed by a conversation around community-based film production and distribution. Most of the film students were keen on how to monetise their work through platforms such as Youtube. I don’t blame them, horror films on Dik’s channel can reach up to 1 million views within four weeks of posting them. This means that filmmakers can quickly rack up their monetization dollars from gore content lovers but the caveat is that they have to follow the dictates of the algorithm.

Screening of Portrait of Muhammed by Ifeatu Nnaobi at Caskade Park, Bandung

Activists in the audience wanted to talk about how to protect oneself when making work that could be interpreted as critical of the government. The September 2025 protest energy was still palpable. I sadly couldn’t offer much more than banding together. I too live in a state that has clamped down on freedom of expression since the latest Gaza genocide.

We screened both films at Caskade Park, located literally under a massive flyover in Bandung. Bandung has a very artistic and political history. It was the location the first Asia-Africa conference in 1955, a gathering of newly independent African and Asian governments interested in decolonisation on a global level.

Ifeatu stands in front of a re-enactment of the Bandung conference at the Asia-Africa Museum in Bandung

I also met local activists who work against displacement of people in urban spaces. Caskade Park is a poignant for having been reclaimed as a meeting point, playground and community garden after the houses there were demolished, and the local community displaced to build the road network over it. There were further resonances between the struggles of Black migrants in Europe and those of indigenuos peoples in Indonesia. I feel deeply grateful to have shared space and time with these people.

In addition to being on the advisory board of the African Book Festival and working to support the curatorial team and volunteers of the festival, I had the pleasure and honour of facilitating two conversations during the festival.

The first was “When we speak, we shake nations – building transnational queer alliances” with Lady Phyll, and sponsored by Hirschfeld Eddy Foundation.

Lady Phyll and Ifeatu Nnaobi at the African Book Festival. Photo credit: Jörg Kandziora

Phyll Opoku-Gyimah is the nucleus of the award-winning celebration and protest that is UK Black Pride. Widely known as Lady Phyll – partly due to her decision to reject an MBE in the New Year’s Honours’ list to protest Britain’s role in formulating anti-LGBTQI+ penal codes across its empire – she was also the executive director of Kaleidoscope Trust, an organisation working to uphold the human rights of LGBTQI+ people around the world. I’ve been a long-time admirer of Lady Phyll. When we speak of role models, I’ve looked up to her as a powerful queer black woman activist.

I remember volunteering at UK Black Pride when I was a university student in England. Back then, UK Black Pride was not as big as it is now, but it was affirming to be in a space dedicated to rejecting the damaging and widely-held myth that queerness is unafrican. Today, UK Black Pride is the world’s largest free pride event for LGBTQIA+ Black and POC (you can donate here).

I remember meeting other queer icons at UKBP, such as Campbell X (If you haven’t seen Stud Life (please go educate yourself ASAP!), and feeling seen and validated.

A question by an audience member stayed with me from the conversation with Lady Phyll. They asked for advice on tactics to stay in community. Oftentimes, those of us at the intersection of love, justice, and a myriad of marginalised identities find ourselves in groups where we’ve come to seek solace from the tyranny of the end-stage capitalist heteropatriarchal world, only to unfortunately recreate or experience the very injuries we are seeking to remedy.

My two cents – Loving Corrections by adrienne maree brown – a roadmap towards collective power, righting wrongs, and true belonging and Love in a F*cked-Up World by Dean Spade.

Zoë Gadegbeku, Ifeatu Nnaobi, Christina Fonthes and Ama Asantewa Diaka. Photo credit: Jörg Kandziora

The second conversation was a panel with writers Ama Asantewa Diaka, Zoë Gadegbeku, and Christina Fonthes. This was a challenging panel to facilitate. Zoe, Ama and Christiana wrote amazing books with queer characters, but the underlying themes were often traumatic. My challenge in going into the conversation was to gently call them in. I’m tired of reading the same old tropes where queer people have to endure pain and suffering. We are not your punching bags. I want to read stories where queer characters lead full lives. I want more stories that are radically committed to rejecting these cultural scripts.

In the conversation with the three writers, I wanted to create a space to explore the support needed to create the necessary conditions where Black queer characters thrive. Stories that centre female pleasure without the backlash of negative consequences. Stories that centre “care as an antidote to violence” – Saadiya Hartmann. I loved closing out the conversation by asking the writers to share a female pleasure story or character that they’ve enjoyed reading about.

Guests at the Festival book market. Photo credit: Jörg Kandziora

As an act of self-care, I asked friends to recommend stories where queer characters had more agency. I can recommend Rosewater by Liv Little, Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly. If you have other recommendations, please send them my way.

Me and Baby Silva on the train in the UK

My trusty little Kodak went into the wind when my backpack was stolen on the train at Prague Central Station. Careful folks, European cities are dangerous and you should avoid them if you can.

A little bit about my missing companion. The Kodak EC 200 film camera was launched in the early 2000s. It’s a simple 28 mm point-and-shoot camera with a built-in flash and works with AA batteries. I bought it for around 15 USD while wandering through the photography section of shops in Centro Historico, Mexico City in late 2023.

That Flash was a pain in the butt for the first few weeks as there is no option to turn it on or off, and I’ve never been a fan of Flash. But, I loved that I could pop it into my pocket and quickly take a picture before anyone noticed. It worked great for candids, events or holidays and was the perfect companion for quiet walks alone. It also sometimes created this vignette around the images that I came to appreciate.

It did take me a while to get the hang of it and understand under what conditions it works well – best with Kodak colour film 200 ISO upwards!!!! I also experimented with double exposure but sadly the camera was snatched before I could fully test those waters.

I do miss it so, I’m sharing some of my favourite work with it, in honour of our time together.

Some Portraits

Some Environmental Shots

R.I.P. Baby Silva ❤

After having worked with the African Book Festival, Berlin, in various capacities over the last few years, I joined their inaugural advisory board to help boost the festival’s programmatic and organisational processes. I’m really looking forward to this year’s edition themed “In Other Wor(l)ds”, celebrating speculative fiction from Ghana and beyond.

In the late summer of 2022, my friend loaned me an analogue camera because I mentioned I wanted to explore this new skill. It’s a Konica Autoreflex TC. After much bumbling with the Konica and impulsively buying two more second-hand analogue cameras (a Kodak and Vivitar) in the following months, I’m sharing some of my favourite images from all three cameras. Here they are…

Teotihuacan 2023

Neo-Perreo Scene, CDMX, 2023

Vitosha Mountains, 2024

Queer B-Cademy Hamburg, 2024

West Midlands, 2024

I had the honour of curating this year’s edition of the African Book Festival in Berlin. I met and was inspired by the works of authors from the continent and the diaspora, and most important, created space to discuss queer and African issues. If I can recommend a few of the books from the programme, they include Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi, Travelling While Black and Lesbian by Khanyisa Mnyaka and Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan. If you’re in Germany, you can order from Interkontinental Bookstore.

I was lucky enough to photograph this year’s edition, “Publicly Irresistible“, featuring incredibly talented artists and gorgeous guests. Unfortunately, queer arts were deemed “too niche” to receive some of the publicly available arts funds we applied for, and therefore had to downsize the festival to two days. It was still a beautiful and uplifting gathering.

Enesi M. released the video for Serpent’s Tongue / Witch’s Heart shot in Salvador. I worked on the videography for this. A few stills are below.

Pictures of Alexandra Obochi displayed at the Reimagining Futures Exhibition, Lagos, April 2023.

The paintings, videos, and photography work presented in REIMAGINING HISTORY celebrate what it means to be queer in Nigeria and Africa today. It alludes to the layers of identity that Queer Africans and Queer Africans living in the diaspora wear daily. In Nigeria, where it is punishable by up to 14 years in prison for openly identifying as LGBTQ+, the works of Adebowale, Ajah, Emezi, nwao, Obochi, and Seidu show us resistance in Nigeria and the diaspora. They combine throwbacks to traditions that embrace gender and sexual diversity with the expressions of young people living in a globalized world. Va-Bene’s “Rituals of Becoming” installation addresses the political injustice, violence and objectification that queer and trans people face worldwide, especially in Ghana. Where religious fundamentalists and those deceived by colonialization might say that queerness is UnAfrican, these documentations refute that.
Credits: Artistic Direction: Ifeatu Nnaobi, Production: Zinzi Samuels, and Dramaturgy: Laro Bogan. Supported by: The TURN2 fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, The Federal Representative for Culture and the Media, Kampnagel and Obodo

The Schmidt and Black Pearl performing at Queer Bcademy, Kampnagel, 2023

The crowd at the music jam at performing at Queer Bcademy, Kampnagel, 2023

The theme for this year’s edition at Queer Bcademy was “Emotional Space Age”. It focused on finding transformative powers in accessing emotions. I loved being there to document all the events.

A picture of Aseman G. Bahadori, Ifeatu Nnaobi and Ambika Thompson in front of an image of the book, "Could This Be Love?"

Interkontinental Verlag put a political twist on Valentine’s Day by organizing this reading and discussion based on our chapters in “Could This Be Love?” with Aseman G. Bahadori, moderated by Ambika Thompson, at Pablo Neruda Library, Berlin.

“Black Atlantik: Decolonial Dialogues with artists and activists from Austria, Brazil and Nigeria” was a chance to share space, talk about and listen to how African, Black and decolonial history is being used and shaped today.

Enesi M and I spent several weeks travelling in Brazil and creating images and videos that invoke elements of nature, spirituality, ancestral worship, and power. We worked collaboratively to create these images in Goiania, Bahia, Belem, and Espirito Santo.

It was a cozy get together on a very cold winter night, reading and talking about my essay “U is for Ugly Behaviour”, published in “Could This Be Love” by Interkontinental Verlag.

In July 2022, Queer Bcademy was granted some funds by Fonds Daku as part of the Artist Labs project to explore how queer artists have been affected by the Pandemic. The labs resulted in a zine “Queers Against Nature” launched in Hamburg in August 2022. Pictures by Me ❤

My essay “U is for Ugly Behaviour” was published in this collection of essays about interracial relationships. The book launch was accompanied by various panels during the African Book Festival 2022. You can get a copy of the book at InterKontinental Book store, Berlin.

I shared space with some lovely people at Disney Europe, during Pride Week to talk about some of the challenges of being queer. We talked about the difficult legal situation in some African countries but also touched on countries that had made amazing legal progress. We talked about the poor social situation in many European countries, especially where it has to do with health care. We also touched on how colonialism and racism intersects to further marginalize queer people of colour living in Europe. It was important to note that “queerness” has always existed in non-Western cultures.

I presented my research project “Ancestral Wisdom: Family Tree” during the Naija Festival in Berlin. The project digs into my personal history, which is a family tree that covers 300 years. Through the tree and the lives of the people in it, the project uncovers larger socio-political histories including transatlantic slave trade, colonization, christianity, and changing gender norms in South-East Nigeria.

This article written by Milena Österreicher talks about finding joy through queer resistance. The feature includes excerpts from interviews with myself, Enesi M. and paidamwoyo dziruni, where we talk about doing decolonial and antiracism work through our craft. It is exactly the message we wanted to send with our music video ‘Sprout‘. It’s in a leftist international Austrian Magazine.

I was invited to share my video art – ‘S’ if for sparkly eyes” and “We want to go again” as a part of the curatorial program Transfigured Boundaries at the Cineteca Nacional de Mexico (National Cinema of Mexico). The national cineteca’s mission is to rescue, preserve, conserve, increase and catalogue the film and non-film collections, which make up the cinematographic memory. Transfigured Boundaries is a space that proposes to the spectator what film can be or become; where questions are posed regarding conception/creation/consumption of cinema. I was really pleased to share my work in la Ciudad de México.

Our first song + music video ❤
Shot in Vienna, Austria in summer 2021 and premiered at the Queer Museum at Volkskundemuseum during Black History Month in February 2022. It was also featured on the programme “Heimat Fremde Heimat” on the Austrian national TV station ORF.

Written by: Ifeatu Nnaobi & Enesi M.
Composed and produced by: Enesi M.
Shot and edited by Ifeatu Nnaobi; with additional camera by Mangoranges
Dancers: Mzamo Nondlwana, Mirabellapaidamwoyo, Mangoranges
Performers: Mzamo Nondlwana, Mirabellapaidamwoyo, Mangoranges, Enesi M., and Ifeatu Nnaobi

This year’s edition of ❤Queer B-Cademy❤ took place from March 18th to 20th at Kampnagel, in Hamburg. It featured artists including Sanni Est, BIPOC Film Society, Room Shakers, Noah Slee, DJ Wax, Alada and Naomi Bah. The theme, “World of Wisdom”, went into the depths of various sources that produce queer knowledge independently of German and European educational ideas. After all, the B in B-Cademy stands for “Being” – i.e. lively, artistic perspectives that do not require academic language and question outdated cultural myths. I was there to handle all things communication, including making some images for documentation.

Our shoot for the album cover of ❤“Break a cracker” by Enesi M<3. Available on all platforms.

I joined ❤Tales of Us❤ is a multi-media production company which creates platforms and experiences for storytellers to address critical global issues.

We took advantage of abundant sunshine in Lagos, Nigeria, to spontaneously shoot the video for ❤FYFR❤ .

I was commissioned to create a piece for the Digital Democracies Festival hosted by Brighton Digital Festival and Frequency Festival, UK. My piece <3″Ancestral Wisdoms – Ask an ancestor“<3 invokes deeper questions of heritage and connection for Black and people of colour living in the diaspora. Participants can engage in the project by asking any of their questions to a customised Artificial Intelligence platform.

It was great to facilitate the “Fueling Digital Activism Training” by the ❤African Queer Youth Initiative❤ (AQYI). AQYI is a network of youth activists and organisations mobilizing, supporting and amplifying the voice of LGBTIQ+ activists, building visibility and strategic networks in support in Africa.

The ❤Radical Film Network❤ Berlin chapter, graciously invited me to speak at the 2021 programme during their long night of short lectures. I talked about filmmaking for empowerment in Marginalized communities.

I worked on the camera team with ❤Tak theatre Aufbau❤ a transnational network focused on themes originating from Arabic-speaking countries, Eastern Europe, North Africa and Roma peoples.

It was an extremely hot couple of days covering the ❤African Book Festival❤ in Berlin. The yearly festival, organized by Interkontinenal e.V. attracts the brightest and best authors from the African continent.

Emilio Cordero, from ❤Naturata Brutalismus❤ invited me to collaborate on some images for the band.

"When you have true representation it just shows how rich the world is, how diverse it is," says filmmaker and Explorer Ifeatu Nnaobi #PrideMonth pic.twitter.com/qcTMEYNZ9F
— National Geographic (@NatGeo) June 28, 2021

❤National Geographic❤ has supported my work with grants, equipment and networking opportunities. I was very proud to be featured in this video during Pride Month.

❤ Chillawe and Enesi M. ❤ invited me to their video shoot for “ich will dich“. I made some BTS images. Naturally, the kissing scenes were my favourite.