Feature film on informal settlements premieres at Toronto International Film Festival
The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos, a film produced by Justice & Empowerment Initiatives and affiliated partners, will premiere at the 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. The feature film tells the story of a young mother from a waterfront slum in Lagos, Nigeria, as she discovers and confronts a plan to evict her community and build a luxury condo development.
Although it is a fictionalized account, the film is based on true events that occurred during the Otodo Gbame evictions of 2016 and 2017, where 30,000 informal slum dwellers were forcibly evicted from their homes in a series of attacks by police and armed aggressors. In April 2017, the residents who remained were forced to flee by boat into the lagoon; nine people are believed to have drowned trying to escape and one person died from a gunshot wound.
Legal empowerment in the face of forced evictions
The issues exposed in the film have been the focus of IDRC-supported research since 2019 on strategies to promote the legal empowerment of the urban poor. Approximately 67% of city-dwellers in Nigeria live in informal settlements that lack access to basic services and secure tenure. They face discrimination and threats of physical violence. The research explores the effectiveness of an inter-city network of community paralegals who receive training and support from Justice & Empowerment Initiatives and serve hundreds of urban poor communities in the country, including the former residents of Otodo Gbame.
In collaboration with the Nigerian Slum / Informal Settlement Federation, Justice & Empowerment Initiatives engages community members in assessing the immediate costs of injustices in informal settlements and their long-term impacts. They are also examining the broader societal costs of urban policy approaches, such as decongestion, formalization and beautification, that often result in arrests, forced evictions and demolition.
In 2021, Justice & Empowerment Initiatives extended its research to Benin and Senegal as part of the global Legal Empowerment Learning Agenda, a people-centred examination of community-based justice approaches in 17 countries, aimed at strengthening democracy and protecting human rights.
The film, seven years in the making, aims to put the forced evictions, security of tenure and housing rights of the urban poor at the centre of global discourse on urban development. It calls for enhanced accountability from international actors who are contributing to displacement, support for national legislation in Nigeria to prohibit forced evictions, and justice for the displaced residents of Otodo Gbame.
Panel discussion in Toronto
Join IDRC and the filmmakers in a panel discussion at the University of Toronto, School of Law, on Friday, September 6 from 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm.