Evi — The Nollywood Musical That Nobody Warned You About

🎬 Quick Summary: Evi is a Nollywood Afrobeats musical film written and directed by Uyoyou Adia for CcHub in partnership with Africa No Filter. It premiered in Nigerian cinemas on March 27, 2026, with an original soundtrack produced by Tolu Obanro (Tyanx). The film follows Evi-Oghene Donalds — a talented but arrogant Afrobeats singer played by Osas Okonyon — whose record label terminates her contract without warning, forcing her to rebuild her career and rediscover herself. The cast includes Uzor Arukwe, Omowunmi Dada, Ibrahim Suleiman, Waje (Aituaje Iruobe), Tomiwa Tegbe, and Femi Branch. The 10-track original soundtrack — featuring songs including “Evi the Superstar,” “Brighter Day,” “Where Do I Go,” “Mirror,” and “All My Love” — is available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Audiomack, YouTube Music, and Boomplay. Evi is one of only a handful of full-length musicals in Nollywood history, joining Lara and the Beat (2018) and A Song from the Dark (2021) in a genre Nollywood has seldom explored at feature length.

Nollywood makes roughly two thousand films a year. Of those two thousand, in any given five-year period, you might find three or four that could honestly be called musicals — films where songs are not incidental background or promotional inserts but structural elements of the storytelling, where the music carries plot information and emotional development that the dialogue alone does not, where the film cannot be understood without the songs and the songs cannot be fully understood without the film. Evi, which premiered in Nigerian cinemas on March 27, 2026, is one of those films. Here is what it is about, who is in it, and why it deserves more attention than it received.

Evi — Key Facts

What Is Evi About — The Full Plot

(cite index=”14-1″>Evi follows Evi-Oghene Donalds, a talented but arrogant Afrobeats singer struggling to rebuild her life, career, and reputation after her record label terminates her contract, forcing her to find redemption and self-discovery. The inciting event — a record label dropping an artist without warning or support — is one of the most common experiences in the Nigerian music industry, and one of the least discussed in Nigerian cinema. Artists are dropped. Their income disappears. Their public profile, built on the assumption of institutional support, collapses. And then they have to figure out who they are when the infrastructure that defined their identity is gone.

(cite index=”15-1″>Stripped of fame and fortune, Evi must navigate the industry’s harsh realities with help from her loyal best friend and a conflicted manager. The film uses music not just as backdrop but as narrative engine, with songs tracking Evi’s emotional journey through loss, vulnerability, and the fight to reclaim her voice. That description of music as “narrative engine” is the key distinction between Evi and most Nigerian films that happen to feature music. In a standard Nollywood production, songs appear when characters celebrate, mourn, or fall in love — they are atmospheric. In Evi, songs occur when Evi has something to say that she cannot say in dialogue. “Where Do I Go” is not a performance number. It is a question she is genuinely asking. “Mirror” is not a showcase. It is the moment she confronts herself. The music is doing the emotional labour that the script cannot do alone, which is what separates a musical from a film with a soundtrack.

Who Is in the Cast

Osas Okonyon as Evi-Oghene Donalds

Osas Okonyon carries the film’s central role — a character who is simultaneously its most sympathetic and most difficult presence. Evi is talented, which makes her worth following. She is also arrogant, which makes her fall credible rather than tragic in the operatic sense. A character who falls from grace because of her own behaviour — not betrayal, not bad luck, but the specific self-sabotage that talent combined with insufficient humility tends to produce — is a harder character to sustain across a feature film than one whose suffering is entirely external. Okonyon’s performance must make the audience believe in both the talent and the arrogance, and then carry them through the stripping of both. That is a demanding central performance, and her casting reflects the filmmakers’ confidence in her range.

Uzor Arukwe — The Conflicted Manager

Uzor Arukwe — born 5 February 1986 in Enugu State, AMVCA 2026 Best Lead Actor winner for Colours of Fire — plays Evi’s conflicted manager. The manager figure in a music industry story is always morally complex: they are simultaneously the artist’s advocate and the industry’s agent, simultaneously protecting the artist and protecting the deal. Arukwe’s specific gift for playing men who know they are compromised but keep going anyway makes him ideal for a role that requires holding both of those truths simultaneously without resolving the tension between them.

Omowunmi Dada, Ibrahim Suleiman, Waje, Femi Branch

Omowunmi Dada — whose 2026 has included The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (December) — brings her characteristic emotional intelligence to a supporting role. Ibrahim Suleiman (born 5 October 1986 in Kaduna State) is one of Nigerian television and film’s most reliably excellent performers, whose presence in any production raises the quality of every scene he is in. Waje — the Grammy-nominated vocalist who also appears in Funke Akindele’s The Four (December 11) — brings genuine musical credibility to a film whose central character is a musician; Waje’s own experience navigating the Nigerian music industry from the inside gives her performance a specificity that would be harder to achieve for a purely theatrical actor. Femi Branch rounds out an ensemble whose collective experience is one of the production’s strongest assets.

The Soundtrack — What to Listen to Before (or After) You Watch

The Evi soundtrack — produced by Tolu Obanro (Tyanx), who Bolaji Ajayi describes as an “award-winning Nigerian music producer” — was released on all major streaming platforms in March 2026, ahead of the film’s cinema premiere, in celebration of Women’s History Month. The decision to release the soundtrack before the film is both a promotional strategy and a statement about the soundtrack’s standalone quality: these songs are meant to work as music before they work as film songs.

The 10-track album features a predominantly female creative team — reflecting director Uyoyou Adia’s consistent centering of women both in front of and behind the camera. The tracks include “Evi the Superstar” (the character’s self-introduction, the musical’s equivalent of a “I Want” song), “Brighter Day” (the aspirational midpoint), “Where Do I Go” (the crisis), “Mirror” (the confrontation with self), and “All My Love” (the resolution). That emotional arc — self-belief to crisis to self-confrontation to resolution — is the classical musical theatre structure applied to a Nigerian Afrobeats context, which is what makes Evi unusual: it is not just a film with songs, it is a film that understands what songs in a musical are supposed to do structurally.

The full soundtrack is available on Spotify Nigeria, Apple Music Nigeria, YouTube Music, Audiomack (free — no subscription required), and Boomplay. Search “Evi soundtrack” or “Evi the Superstar” on any platform to find it.

The Context — Nollywood’s Musical History

(cite index=”15-1″>Evi joins the small but significant roster of Nollywood musicals that includes Lara and the Beat and A Song from the Dark, while shining light on the particular challenges women face in the music business. Lara and the Beat (2018) — directed by Kemi Adetiba — is the most commercially successful Nigerian musical to date. A Song from the Dark (2021) is a smaller, more artistically ambitious production. Evi sits between these two in ambition and scope: more polished than A Song from the Dark, more intimate than Lara and the Beat, and more industry-specific than either. Its focus on a woman who has been dropped by her label — and who must rebuild without the institutional support that enabled her — gives it a thematic specificity that speaks directly to the 2026 Nigerian music industry’s realities. Labels have more power than ever to define and discard artists. The story of what happens after the discard is a story Nollywood had not told before Evi.

Who Made Evi — CcHub and Africa No Filter

CcHub — Co-Creation Hub, founded in 2011 in Yaba, Lagos — is best known as Nigeria’s premier technology and social innovation hub, the incubator behind dozens of Nigerian tech startups. Its involvement in Evi as a film backer signals a specific institutional bet: that creative industries, specifically film, are a productive space for the kind of investment CcHub typically makes in technology. Africa No Filter — a pan-African philanthropic initiative focused on shifting harmful and limiting narratives about Africa in global media — is the ideal partner for a film about a Nigerian woman reclaiming her story after it has been taken from her. The institutional pairing of a tech incubator and a narrative-change initiative produced one of the most unusual and most thoughtful Nollywood productions of the first half of 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Evi the Nollywood film about?

Evi is a Nollywood Afrobeats musical film following Evi-Oghene Donalds — a talented but arrogant Afrobeats singer played by Osas Okonyon — whose record label terminates her contract without warning, forcing her to rebuild her life, career, and sense of self. With help from her loyal best friend and a conflicted manager, she navigates the music industry’s harsh realities. The film uses an original 10-track Afrobeats soundtrack as a narrative engine — songs track her emotional journey rather than simply accompanying it. It premiered in Nigerian cinemas on March 27, 2026.

Who is in the cast of Evi?

Evi stars Osas Okonyon as Evi-Oghene Donalds (lead). The supporting cast includes Uzor Arukwe as her conflicted manager, Omowunmi Dada, Ibrahim Suleiman, Waje (Aituaje Iruobe), Tomiwa Tegbe, and Femi Branch. The film is directed by Uyoyou Adia and produced by Judith Audu and Bolaji Ajayi for CcHub in partnership with Africa No Filter.

What songs are on the Evi soundtrack?

The Evi original soundtrack — produced by Tolu Obanro (Tyanx) — contains 10 tracks including “Evi the Superstar,” “Brighter Day,” “Where Do I Go,” “Mirror,” and “All My Love.” The soundtrack is available on Audiomack (free — no subscription required), Spotify Nigeria, Apple Music Nigeria, YouTube Music, and Boomplay. Search “Evi soundtrack” or “Evi the Superstar” on any of these platforms to find it immediately.

Is Evi a musical — how is it different from other Nollywood films?

Yes — Evi is a full-length Nollywood musical, one of only four or five in the genre’s entire history. What distinguishes it from standard Nigerian films that feature music is that the songs are structural: they carry plot information and emotional development that the dialogue alone does not. Songs occur when the character has something to say that cannot be expressed in words. This is the defining feature of the musical as a form, and Evi applies it to a Nigerian Afrobeats context. Its closest predecessors in Nollywood are Lara and the Beat (2018) and A Song from the Dark (2021).

Who directed Evi?

Evi was written and directed by Uyoyou Adia — a Nigerian filmmaker working within a predominantly female creative team. The film was produced by Judith Audu and Bolaji Ajayi, backed by CcHub (Co-Creation Hub, Lagos) in partnership with Africa No Filter, and its 10-track original soundtrack was produced by Tolu Obanro (Tyanx). It premiered in Nigerian cinemas on March 27, 2026.

Is Evi available to stream in Nigeria?

The Evi original soundtrack is confirmed available on Audiomack (free), Spotify Nigeria, Apple Music Nigeria, YouTube Music, and Boomplay from March 2026. The film itself — its streaming platform and availability for home viewing in Nigeria — has not been confirmed in available sources as of October 2026. Check the CcHub and Africa No Filter social media channels for the most current information on where to watch the film.

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Sources

1. News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) — “Star-studded musical film ‘Evi’ premieres on March 27” — nannews.ng — March 11, 2026
2. Culture Custodian — “8 Nollywood Films Worth Your Attention in 2026” — culturecustodian.com — 2026
3. WhatKeptMeUp — “New in Nigeria: Movies and TV Shows to Watch This March 2026” — whatkeptmeup.com — August 10, 2026
4. Digimillennials — “Exciting Nollywood Films to Watch Out for in 2026” — digimillennials.com — 2026

Last updated: 3 October 2026 · NaijaSabi Entertainment Desk