Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Latvia but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.

Country: Nigeria
Movie:  The Lost Okoroshi
Director: Abba Makama
Year: 2019
The Elevator Pitch: Raymond lives in a place between the city and the country on the outskirts of Lagos. He struggles to make it in the modern world but knows almost nothing of the old world. He dream of the masquerade but doesn’t understand it and then one morning he wakes as a purple spirit. The Okoroshi.

How Was the Movie?: Dang, we loved this movie so much! We were going to watch a different movie but at the last second saw this and decided it sounded more interesting and we were absolutely right. This movie is about social and psychological displacement. Displacement of culture, of peoples, of our relationship to each other and society and even the concepts of our spirituality. While I have to warn you up front this movie is definitely made in Nigeria on a very small budget with some really strange cuts, a little on and off acting, and a couple of too repetitive blocking to save time and money, if you’ve ever watched a B-movie it’s no worse for the wear than that.

I don’t want to spoil the movie too much but it does take a moment to get going because it has a lot to set up about the main character and his place (or un-place) in society. Once he is transformed into the spirit the movie goes into hyper drive. My husband and I have literally been talking about this movie for the past two weeks because it’s so good. 

Movies like this are especially interesting to me because I have never lived anywhere but the city. My best friend grew up in a corn field in rural as can be Pennsylvania and I remember him talking about how unmoored and confused he was moving to the city for college. How it reordered his entire world even though he’d grown up seeing cities on TV and having people tell them about it. I think the struggles in this movie are universal even though the mode is fantastical and the culture is Igbo, there is something here in asking how we reclaim old ways in new places or if we even can? Who has agency or claim over these? What is their purpose or can they be made new?

This might have been my favorite movie so far even with its admittedly rough edges. (If you’re in the US it’s free on Tubi).

What was for Dinner?: 

I don’t think I’ve ever eaten Nigerian food which seems odd to me but it’s like the funny thing where I grew up eating Cuban and Dominican food and not Mexican food just a quirk of where I was and the people around me. Anyway I decided to source some scotch bonnet sauce (annoying!) and make Efo Riro which is basically a spicy meat stew (I used chicken) with lots of greens. I don’t have the same ones as in Nigeria but I made do with spinach and kale. I was worried that because I couldn’t get the chilies themselves the sauce would not be spicy or flavorful but I was wrong and it was delicious! And spicy! I’m not a spice wimp but I believe spicy food should actually have a flavor and wow, if this is what scotch bonnets taste like that flavor is delicious. I’m devastated because a 200ml bottle of sauce cost me 11 euros. Also I did add some fresh tomatoes even though one recipe said never add tomatoes and the other recipe said that efo riro is incomplete without tomatoes. I’m not here to resolve culture differences in Nigeria but I had tomatoes, so in they went.

For desert I made chin chin which is, as I like to say, humans favorite thing. Humans love a lot of stuff: souring milk, making a flat bread, turning all available things into alcohol, a little dumpling object, rice pudding (!?), and of course: what if bread, but fried.

Humans love a fried bread. 

I don’t tend to make a lot of things that are fried bread because I find frying things to be a little annoying but these were actually really good and fun to make. They have spices in them so they’re not plain as they look but we both decided quickly that it’d be even better with a sauce so I thinned some jam and we dunked them in that while we watched the movie. Probably not very traditional.

Did I make a purple cocktail out of weird shit I had in the house? Yes I did. I think it was vodka, blue curacao, grenadine, lime juice, and topped with some soda water. Actually pretty nice. And yes, my dutch oven has seen things.

That’s it for Nigera, see you next in Peru!