Will Niava’s Wonderful Journey From Ghana to Canada to 2026 Sundance Triumph – Film Efiko

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Few weeks after his own American success, Will Niava is speaking about the last couple of filmmakers from the continent to have shown their film and won awards at the world’s biggest independent film festival. Naturally, he seems joyful. Was he aware that, a couple years before, another West African filmmaker had won the same award he took at the prestigious festival? He is and he mentions the name—Akinola Davies Jnr—immediately. “The fact that he won meant that my voice could also be heard around the world,” he says. “You can see the things that it has done for his career and these are the things that I am looking for.”

He then goes on to mention other African filmmakers who have been to Utah for Sundance before the internet temporarily freezes up his image on my screen. He is, obviously, a student of Africa’s success at international venues. Which is a good thing because he is now one of those success stories.

Although based in Canada, Niava is speaking from Accra, where his mother, a Ghanaian, lives and where he was raised from age 12 after his birth, in Abidjan, to two high-profile linguists. He talks about his dad, an Ivorian, translating for Mandela and his mum doing work for the WHO, his respect for both of them about as audible in his voice as his cosmopolitanism. His Sundance-winning short, Jazz Infernal, is dedicated to the memory of his father.

Niava is himself a dad now—a “hands-on parent”, as he calls it—to an 8-month-old baby. Which tells me he’s riding quite the high: Bicoastal living, new baby, Sundance award. It’s a charmed life.

In fact, to get, perhaps, a hint of a setback for the reigning champion of international Sundance short films, you might have to go back—way back.

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As a kid, he had been a big fan of football and might have gone…