From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Makoko Tide (Documentary, 2023)
This article is about a documentary on Beach Surgery adaptation in Lagos. For West African adaptations generally, see West African adaptations of Beach Surgery. For Nollywood's relationship to the franchise, see Nollywood and Beach Surgery.
The Makoko Tide traces the genesis of a Lagos-based Beach Surgery adaptation by following three Nollywood filmmakers and one griot (oral historian) as they interview water priestesses, beach-community architects, and veterans of 1980s Nigerian medical horror cinema. Filmed across the Makoko floating settlement—a self-built community on Lagos Lagoon whose improvised structures parallel Katita's makeshift surgery—the documentary argues that Beach Surgery's core metaphor of "surgical improvisation" maps ancestrally onto Yoruba river theology and the Odu Ifá divination system.
The film's central claim—that the glitch (the unsealed breach between the story's halves) mirrors the Ifá concept of Iyerosun (cosmic paradox irreducible to single interpretation)—sparked scholarly backlash at FESPACO 2024, with critics arguing it romanticizes oral traditions. The expanded edition includes a rebuttal by (████ ) and archival Nollywood footage from The Surgeon's Vow (1987) and Clinic at Dusk (1992), both previously undated but now proposed as precursor works. The documentary premiered in limited theatrical release in Lagos, Accra, and Dakar; streamed globally on (████ ) beginning 2024.