Editi Effiong’s first feature puts Richard Mofe-Damijo in the role of a Lagos church deacon whose son is framed and killed by corrupt police. Made for about $1 million, it became the first Nigerian film to reach third place on Netflix‘s global chart, and a sequel is now in post-production.

A church deacon in Lagos buries his only son and then goes to war with the men who killed him, some of whom wear police uniforms. That is the engine of The Black Book, the 2023 Nigerian crime thriller that Editi Effiong wrote with Bunmi Ajakaiye and directed as his first feature, and that Netflix released worldwide on 22 September 2023. Richard Mofe-Damijo plays Paul Edima, the deacon whose quiet life turns out to have been built on top of a very different one.

The film arrived with two labels attached. The first was its budget, around $1 million, widely reported at the time as the most expensive production Nollywood had mounted. The second came within two weeks of release, when it became the first Nigerian film to climb to third place on Netflix’s global ranking of English-language films. Together they explain why, three years on, The Black Book is still the reference point whenever the industry discusses what a Nigerian thriller built for a global platform can look like.

A framed son and a father with a past

The story begins with a crime that has nothing to do with Paul. Professor Craig, an anti-corruption figure played by Bimbo Akintola, is targeted by an armed gang that wants her out of her post: her husband and their infant child are abducted on the streets of Lagos, and although she gives in to the demands, both are killed. The police need a culprit quickly, and corrupt officers pin the crime on Damilola Edima, played by Olumide Oworu, an innocent young man who is killed in the process.

Damilola is Paul’s son. With the help of Vic Kalu, an aspiring journalist played by Ade Laoye, Paul identifies the men responsible, takes them, and records their confessions on camera. The recording reaches Vic’s editor, who destroys it on the grounds that the case is too sensitive to publish. The gang then kills several police officers and arranges for the blame to fall on Paul, who is declared a public enemy.

The man behind the gang is a general, played by Alex Usifo Omiagbo, and he and Paul are not strangers. Before he became a deacon, Paul worked for him as a hitman, and that history reaches further into Vic’s own life than either of them first admits. The black book of the title is the record Paul kept of those years, and the plot turns on who holds it.

From producer to director

Effiong came to directing from the producer’s side and from technology. Through his company, Anakle Films, he produced Up North (2018), directed by Tope Oshin, and The Setup (2019), the first two Anakle titles acquired by Netflix. He then directed Fishbone (2020), a short film about counterfeit drugs set in the Lagos waterfront community of Makoko, executive-produced the time-travel film Day of Destiny (2021) and produced The Setup 2 (2022). Bunmi Ajakaiye, his co-writer here, had already written Up North for the company.

By his own account, Effiong ended up in the director’s chair because the filmmakers he approached could not commit to a single project for a year or more. The schedule was long for its lead as well: Mofe-Damijo spent around 13 months on the film, much of it on physical preparation for a role that asks a man in his early sixties to carry an action thriller.

A million dollars and a tech-funded slate

The money came from an unusual place for Nollywood. The executive producers were drawn from Nigeria’s technology sector, among them founders of the payment companies Paystack and Flutterwave and of the savings app PiggyVest, alongside the producers Uyai Effiong and Kemi Lala Akindoju, an actress best known for Dazzling Mirage who co-produced Gangs of Lagos the same year. The budget paid for logistics the industry rarely attempted, including night shoots on Tarkwa Bay, a beach off Lagos that had to be supplied with generators, and a crew drawn from six countries.

Behind the camera, the film relies on two names closely tied to Nigeria’s prestige productions. Cinematographer Yinka Edward had shot Kunle Afolayan’s October 1 and Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart, and composer Kulanen Ikyo had scored both of those films as well as the Netflix series Blood Sisters. The editing is by Antonio Rui Ribeiro, and the art direction by Pat Nebo and Chima Temple.

A cast of Nollywood veterans

Casting Richard Mofe-Damijo as a man pulled back into violence leans on a long career. Born in 1961 and known across Nigeria as RMD, he rose to fame in television soaps such as Ripples and Checkmate, became a writer and producer with Out of Bounds, and won Best Actor at the first Africa Movie Academy Awards in 2005. He also stepped away from the screen to serve as Commissioner for Culture and Tourism in Delta State from 2009 to 2015, which makes The Black Book a lead role for an actor whose public profile goes well beyond film.

The cast around him is built in the same way. Alex Usifo Omiagbo, born in 1953, made his name in 1988 as the villain of Zeb Ejiro’s soap Ripples, the same series in which a young Mofe-Damijo played a police inspector, so the film reunites two faces of that era as adversaries. Sam Dede, who plays Angel, won an Africa Movie Academy Award in 2005 for The Mayors and teaches acting at the University of Port Harcourt. Shaffy Bello plays Big Daddy, a businesswoman with a private army of female soldiers, and Ireti Doyle, Kelechi Udegbe, Taiwo Ajai-Lycett and Femi Branch, who plays the general as a younger man, complete the ensemble. Ade Laoye, trained in theatre at Pennsylvania State University and known for Finding Hubby and Castle & Castle, is the younger counterweight to all that experience.

Charts, awards and a familiar grievance

Netflix’s own weekly figures show how the film travelled. In its first, partial week it entered the global chart for English-language films at fourth place with 5.6 million views. The following week it rose to third with 11.2 million views and 23.1 million hours watched, and it held on for a third week at tenth place with 3.7 million views. It reached the Top 10 in more than 69 countries.

Part of that reach at home has an obvious explanation. A story about police officers pinning a killing on a young man they never investigated landed in a country where police abuse is a documented and recent grievance: in October 2020 the #EndSARS protests filled Nigerian streets against a police unit accused of extortion, torture and killings. The film never needed to name that history for local audiences to recognise the premise.

Recognition followed. Mofe-Damijo received an Outstanding Performance Award at the 2023 Africa International Film Festival, and at the 2024 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards the film was nominated for Best Movie, Best Lead Actor, Best Supporting Actress for Bimbo Akintola and Best Art Direction, winning Best Editing for Antonio Rui Ribeiro.

Old Scores: the sequel

In February 2026 Anakle Films confirmed the cast of The Black Book: Old Scores, a sequel that picks up the story of Paul Edima, with Effiong again writing and directing. Mofe-Damijo returns, as do Shaffy Bello and Alex Usifo Omiagbo, joined by Kate Henshaw and the comedian Bright Okpocha, known as Basketmouth. The production pairs Anakle Films with Invention Studios, bringing in Nicky Weinstock, an Emmy-nominated producer of Severance, alongside Effiong and Mimi Bartels. Yinka Edward is back as cinematographer, and the company described a crew of around 300 people drawn from the United Kingdom, the United States, China and Japan. No release date had been announced.

Seen from 2026, The Black Book settled a commercial question rather than an artistic one: a Nigerian-financed revenge thriller set among Lagos police stations and churches could sit in Netflix’s global top three. Its shape is a familiar one, the retired killer drawn back by a loss he cannot accept, and the interest lies in where Effiong placed it and in the veterans he asked to carry it. Old Scores will show whether Paul Edima can hold up a franchise with an international crew behind him.