Bridging generational gaps: young audiences and the new epic film in Nollywood

“Ẹ̀yin ọ̀dọ́, ẹ jíí” (“Youth, wake up”)Footnote1, Gbotija, the protagonist of Jagun Jagun, instructs in an evocative final monologue at the climax of the movie. Although the film is set in an early modern time of inter-ethnic wars, many reviews reflect the contemporary import of the ideological move of this monologue toward questions of gerontocracy, corruption, and the need for a new generation’s uprising. While these are hardly new thematic preoccupations in Nollywood, I ask in this article how Jagun Jagun contemporizes its setting and narrative into the here and now by drawing on contemporary youth urban language registers in its texts, poetics, and entexualizations across media. To understand how Jagun Jagun bridges what appear to be distinct domains of spatio-temporal activity, I explore different aspects of the filmic text’s circulation—the script itself, digital editing, Netflix Nigeria’s social media marketing, and the postproduction uptake of film cuts on digital platforms—and how these draw on youth registers that allow an early modern epic to be remediated into a present moment. I argue that engaging with the modalities and media through which these spatio-temporal connections are made is an important step to understanding how Jagun Jagun’s historical fiction is made realizable as salient for the realities of a younger generation.