Praise Odigie Paige’s (Very) Unusual Route To Sundance – Film Efiko

It is probably hyperbole to say that nobody has ever gotten to their first Sundance screening in the way that Praise Odigie Paige has. But it might be true.

A few years ago, she was an undocumented person in the US. Go back some years and she was a 10-year-old kid who had just moved to the US. Go even further and you’d find a kid growing up in Ibadan, Nigeria, raised by Esan parents in a family where nobody would have known that this child would be showing Birdie, an impressive short film about two immigrant daughters and a stranger from home, to a crowd of filmgoers at the 2026 edition of the Sundance Film Festival.

The day we speak, she is a figure on a screen with bright eyes and full, wild hair. The “writer-artist-filmmaker”, as she describes herself, is about as bubbly as her film is restrained, a gorgeous tightly written picture she wrote and directed herself. By way of a bio, she says she enters every story through “the lens of poetry even though I don’t write poems” and then says she had been living “precariously until recently”. This is how her previous status as undocumented gets into the conversation.

Obviously too young to understand what was happening at the time, Odigie Paige recalls her family receiving a letter with an ultimatum: they had 30 days to leave the US. “Clearly, we did not leave,” she laughs.

But even without grasping what exactly the problem was, she grew up with a sense of dread, which then became a feeling of being caged, given the impossibility of travel for the undocumented. She tells me that in recent years, she has had dreams where she’s hustling to go back to Nigeria in a manner similar to the harried manner her parents left their home country. (Somehow, her folks had missed their flight and were then given five minutes to get on the plane that…