When Mo Abudu engages you in conversation, she exudes the quiet authority of a woman who has built an empire, and the warmth of a storyteller who still believes in humanity’s power to connect through narrative. At the Toronto International Film Festival this September, her latest project, Dust to Dreams, written and directed by Idris Elba, earned a standing ovation. Now, as the film heads to the London Film Festival this October, Abudu reflects on the story, her journey, and why this short film might be her most personal yet.
Mo Abudu
When Mo Abudu decided, at 40, to leave a secure corporate job in oil and gas and start a talk show in Nigeria, friends thought she was having a midlife crisis. Twenty-one years later, the woman often dubbed “Africa’s Oprah” laughs at the memory. “I just knew I had to be part of the solution,” she says. “I was tired of people telling our stories for us, often very badly. You either complain, or you change things.”
That drive to reclaim narrative power runs through Dust to Dreams, her latest project, which premiered at the TIFF in September and will screen at the London Film Festival on 8th October. Written and directed by Idris Elba, the short film stars the British singer-songwriter Seal alongside Nollywood favourites Nse Ikpe-Etim, Eku Edewor, Atlanta Bridget Johnson and Constance Olatunde. Set in the beating heart of Lagos, it tells of a dying nightclub owner who yearns to reunite her daughter with her estranged father — a soldier whose return ignites old wounds. Through music, the family finds redemption.
Abudu wrote the first draft of this story before sharing it with Elba. Idris read it and said ‘Can I take a crack at it?’ and the rest is history . Abudu says the power of the film lies in its universality. “I wanted to show that our experiences — love, family, loss — are the same everywhere. People outside Africa sometimes forget that. So I wrote a story about a mother, a daughter, a father, and music that heals them.”
Elba, she says, brought his trademark discipline and empathy to the project. “Idris did everything to make it work,” she says. “He cared deeply about every detail — the performances, the sound, the music. He made sure it felt honest.” Seal’s casting, she adds, was “a stroke of genius”: “His voice carries that mix of pain and hope the story needed.”
Produced under Abudu’s EbonyLife Films banner and financed in part by Afreximbank, Dust to Dreams looks and feels like a feature despite its short runtime. “We treated it with the same ambition as a major film,” Abudu says. “Because African stories deserve that standard of excellence.”
Born in London’s Hammersmith and raised partly in Tunbridge Wells and Lagos, Abudu has long been fascinated by identity and belonging. “Growing up, I was always defending who I was,” she recalls. “That experience shaped me.” Now, as CEO of EbonyLife Media — the Nigerian powerhouse behind global collaborations with Netflix, Sony and Lionsgate — she’s shaping how the world sees Africa.
“The world expects the worst of us,” she says with passion, “but it’s our responsibility to show the best.”
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