Author • Poet • Filmmaker
Berlinale Teddy Award-winning producer with work that moves between film, literature, and poetic form. Built in Scotland, informed by Nigeria, and made for festival rooms, readers, and audiences attentive to emotional detail.
A body of work shaped by language first, then image.
Imafidon Gift Jesurobo-Owie is an author, poet, filmmaker, producer, and screenwriter whose work explores emotional pressure, memory, displacement, and the fragile, often difficult intimacy of being seen. His practice is rooted in language — in rhythm, silence, and the weight of what is withheld — before it finds its final expression in image.
His films do not announce themselves loudly. They unfold. They observe. They remain. Drawn to restraint rather than spectacle, his storytelling privileges gesture over exposition, presence over explanation, and atmosphere over resolution. Characters are not pushed toward conclusions; they are allowed to exist within tension, contradiction, and quiet revelation.
Across both film and literature, his work is concerned with the unseen architecture of human experience: grief that does not perform itself, love that resists articulation, and the lingering echoes of choices that cannot be undone. He is particularly interested in the emotional spaces people occupy when language fails them — where silence becomes the only truthful expression.
As a producer, he served on the Berlinale Teddy Award-winning feature All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White, a film that has screened at over 100 international festivals, reinforcing his commitment to cinema that travels across cultures while remaining deeply personal. His co-writing credit on Hakkunde further reflects his engagement with stories of resilience, migration, and identity.
His poetic works, including Scars and Obeisance to the Mind, inform the tonal and structural sensibility of his films. For him, cinema and poetry are not separate disciplines but extensions of the same impulse — to capture what is felt but rarely spoken.
Working between Edinburgh and Nigeria, Jesurobo-Owie creates films that exist in the space between worlds — geographically, emotionally, and culturally. His work carries a quiet universality, grounded in specificity yet resonant across borders. Each project is built with careful attention to form, tone, and emotional truth, resulting in films that linger long after they end.
He is not interested in providing answers. He is interested in leaving something behind.
Produced and written work already released into the world. Each title carries its own formal weather, while remaining consistent with a broader authorial sensibility.
A quietly radical Nigerian feature whose tenderness is carried by formal restraint. From Berlinale into an expansive festival life, the film travelled with clarity, emotional intelligence, and formal confidence.
A warm, unsentimental feature about unemployment, dislocation, and self-invention. The writing balances humour, social accuracy, and tenderness without straining for effect.
A psychological drama series moving through therapy, secrecy, and fracture. The tone remains intimate and uneasy, allowing serial form to hold dramatic pressure rather than exposition.
These projects form a developing slate across short and feature form. Each begins with a literary precision and moves towards cinema through rhythm, withholding, and a serious attention to the inner lives of characters.
A struggling livestreamer follows a grieving widower through Edinburgh for content until witnessing turns into trespass, and the night ends in moral exposure.
Craig needs footage. Efe needs to be left alone. What begins as quiet observation becomes the theft of a private night, streamed to strangers and consumed as spectacle.
A war photographer who cannot grieve his dead brother in private spends one day in Glasgow photographing the grief of strangers until the act of looking turns back on him.
John Ross has left one email unopened for eleven months. In trying to frame the sorrow of others, he is forced into the one frame he has resisted all along: his own.
In Lagos 2008, a thirteen-year-old danfo conductor cares for his paralysed mother and younger brothers while the city fails to notice the weight he is already carrying.
Dayo does not perform heroism. He performs routine. Across one difficult season, labour, street violence, and familial duty become the quiet architecture of a childhood already gone.
A young Nigerian chemist in Glasgow must decide whether to call for help when a white woman dies in his bed, knowing the right decision may still destroy him.
What follows is not a thriller but an emotional reckoning with race, vulnerability, and the unbearable arithmetic of what a body means in public once catastrophe has arrived.
After her husband dies, a Lagos schoolteacher is taken to his village and forced through seven days of widowhood rites designed to prove she did not kill him.
Inheritance, ritual, exhaustion, and secrecy close in around Oghogho as grief becomes ordeal and tradition becomes a test of what she can retain of herself.
After surviving a Channel crossing, a Nigerian woman arrives in Scotland with nothing, only to be granted asylum at the exact moment she is accused of unspeakable crimes.
The film holds sympathy under pressure, asking what remains of certainty when care, terror, and identity begin to contradict each other.
The producing and writing work already sits inside a recognisable international film conversation: measured, formally assured, and open to audiences beyond one geography.
It signals a practice shaped not by aspiration alone, but by visible contact with serious institutions, screenings, and artistic scrutiny.
Poetry and prose shape the work at its source. They determine rhythm, compression, and the kind of silence a film can hold before an image arrives.
Across page and screen, the interest remains the same: atmosphere, pressure, memory, and the small fractures through which a life becomes visible.
The poems are not a side note to the films. They are part of the same authorship, the same voice learning how much can be said with precision and how much must remain withheld.
For producing conversations, literary opportunities, commissions, readings, and collaborations across film and writing.