Children of Blood and Bone

The Book First

This film follows Zélie Adebola, a young girl in the magical kingdom of Orïsha who goes on a quest to restore magic to her people after the ruling class violently suppressed the maji — the magic practitioners — and stripped them of everything.

What made the production cinematic wasn’t just the story. It was a world, from Yoruba mythology inspiration, West African cultural history, and the pain of watching people killed by state violence. Orïsha isn’t a generic fantasy kingdom — it has its own gods, its own language, its own logic. The magic system is rooted in ashe, an authentic Yoruba concept. The incantations are Yoruba inspired. The world is specific in the way that only genuine cultural grounding makes possible.

This was the kind of story I had been waiting to see on screen.

The Film

Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood — the stars Thuso Mbedu as Zélie, Amandla Stenberg, Damson Idris, Tosin Cole, Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Idris Elba, Lashana Lynch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Regina King. It is an extraordinary cast assembled around a story that deserves it.

I came onto the project as a set designer. My job was to help build the physical world of Orïsha — the spaces, the architecture, the environments — so that the world of the book could exist somewhere real enough for a camera to photograph and an actor to inhabit.

Why This Project Mattered to Me

The work I am drawn to tends to involve worlds that have to be built with real cultural intelligence behind them. Orïsha is not a shorthand. It is a specific place with a specific history, a specific cosmology, specific materials, specific ways that people move and gather and worship. Getting that wrong — borrowing from the wrong visual traditions, genericizing what is precise — would betray everything Prince-Bythewood spent getting right.

That responsibility felt familiar. It was the same obligation I had felt on Wakanda Forever: to hold the line between what the research demands and what production pressure might settle for. The story earns it. The communities whose culture is being drawn on are watching and they can be far more critical than when they are gazed upon by unsympathetic outsiders. That kind of accountability is something I take seriously, and something I find creatively sustaining rather than burdensome.

Looking Forward

The film releases in IMAX in January 2027. I am genuinely looking forward to seeing the finished work — to seeing what Gina and the star-studded team have built with the material, and to seeing Orïsha on a screen at the scale it deserves. This is the kind of film that comes along rarely: a story rooted in a specific culture, told by people who believe in it, made with the budget and the cast to reach a global audience. I was glad to be part of it.