What united these films, across countries and sensibilities, was their insistence that the intimate is political; that the smallest domestic crack can reveal the larger cultural architecture around it.
By Joseph Jonathan
Short films thrive on compression. They ask filmmakers to distill a single emotional truth, a single fracture in the human experience, into a narrative that breathes quickly but lands deeply. At the 6th Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival (ENIFF), that truth resonated in the short films that screened there. What united these films, across countries and sensibilities, was their insistence that the intimate is political; that the smallest domestic crack can reveal the larger cultural architecture around it.
V’s Secret (Egypt)
The premise of V’s Secret is deceptively simple: while hanging laundry, Adam (Maher Gamal) accidentally drops his wife’s underwear onto the balcony of his neighbour, Mr. Bassem (Ahmad El Banhawy). A small embarrassment soon spirals into a tense, awkward, and increasingly absurd encounter as Adam attempts to retrieve the underwear without alerting Bassem, an attempt that goes poorly enough to force a direct confrontation between the two men.
Bassma Farah Nancy directs the film with a quirky tonal confidence, using a mundane domestic error to expose the fragility of male pride and the speed with which suspicion can become certainty. This is where the short is most delightful: in its ability to turn the trivial into the combustible, without ever losing the undercurrent of humour. Adam’s anxiety—rooted not just in embarrassment, but in his assumptions about what a stranger could do with his wife’s underwear—animates the film’s narrative rhythm.
What appears to be a comedy of errors gradually reveals itself as a portrait of how paranoia can reshape neighbourly dynamics. The cramped interiors, the tense glances, the awkward physical blocking, all contribute to the sense that Adam’s world is shrinking as quickly as his suspicion grows. Nancy’s eye for texture and timing keeps the film lively, even as it tiptoes around themes of trust, insecurity, and the unspoken dramas that define urban proximity.
V’s Secret ultimately works because it understands how easily the domestic sphere can become a stage for broader anxieties: about marriage, masculinity, and the stories we tell ourselves when fear and pride collide.
The Noise Around Her Black (Nigeria)
Silence is often considered an essential part of grief. But in Odaro Eguavoen’s The Noise Around Her Black, silence is a luxury Funke and her three children cannot afford. After the death of their husband and father, the family finds themselves at the centre of funeral proceedings, more concerned with spectacle than solace.
Eguavoen attempts to express the family’s grief through near-wordless scenes in the beginning: Funke’s muted stillness, the children’s hesitant movements, the quiet domestic space now marked by absence. But this silence is quickly shattered as relatives flood the home, filling it with accusations, interrogations, and demands: What killed him? What did she do? Where is the property? Who is entitled to what?
The film’s power lies not in dramatic confrontation but in its observational gaze. Eguavoen does not sensationalise the cruelty of communal intrusion; she documents it. The camera lingers on faces—strained, weary, entitled, performative—capturing the collision between private grief and public ownership. In many Nigerian communities, death does not belong to the bereaved alone; it becomes a communal event, complete with rituals, politics, and the weaponisation of tradition.
The Noise Around Her Black interrogates this phenomenon with striking clarity. It asks why grief, particularly for widows, must be negotiated under the weight of suspicion. Why mourning must be accompanied by scrutiny. Why tradition often amplifies isolation rather than alleviating it.
By the time the film ends, what lingers is not just sorrow but frustration, at the systems that continue to police women’s grief, and at a culture that often mistakes noise for care.
Falling Out (Uganda)
Though Ugandan in origin, Alisanyukirwa Joy Matovu’s Falling Out feels emotionally universal. Ruth (Alina Camilla) and Wesley (Michael Tamale) find themselves trapped in an arranged marriage orchestrated by both families, a union already fraying at the edges by the time Wesley asks for a divorce. But the film’s most affecting moment comes earlier, in an exchange between Ruth and her mother, where we learn that Ruth’s mother has had to endure an unhappy marriage herself.
Lightning, they say, doesn’t strike the same place twice. Yet Ruth’s life suggests otherwise. She is being ushered into the very cycle her mother could not escape; an inheritance of silence, endurance, and marital duty masquerading as tradition. The exchange between mother and daughter ripples through the entire film, revealing how generational pain often disguises itself as cultural continuity.
Matovu uses this conflict to probe a larger, quieter question: How many decisions in African families are shaped not by desire, but by fear: fear of breaking patterns, fear of shame, fear of disappointing society, fear of choosing differently? In a world where marriage is still seen as an anchor for women, irrespective of compatibility or aspiration, Falling Out challenges the audience to confront the emotional cost of repeating what has already proven harmful.
The film does suffer from certain dialogue misfires and some performances that lack emotional precision, leaving some scenes feeling less textured than they should. Yet the message remains unmistakable. Falling Out is a plea for rupture—a call to end cycles that no longer serve, to resist the generational hand-me-downs of unhappiness, and to imagine a future where daughters inherit choices, not traumas.
Ụmụnne (Nigeria)
In Ụmụnne, Adaeze Sebastin explores the lengths to which siblings will go to protect each other in a world that offers them few alternatives. Chikaodinaka and Nonyelum, bonded by love and hardship, live parallel lives of desperation: Chika is a thief; Nonye is a sex worker. Each believes she is shielding the other from the full breadth of their financial crisis, until their hidden lives collide.
The film attempts to capture the fierce, complicated devotion that often defines sisterhood, particularly in low-income contexts where survival becomes its own moral universe. Sebastin frames both women not as cautionary tales but as individuals negotiating impossible choices. In a society where social support is scarce and opportunities scarce, desperation becomes a logic of its own.
Yet for all its sincerity, the film struggles to fully justify the extremity of the sisters’ decisions. The narrative gestures toward their suffering— losing their parents, dwindling income, societal pressure—but stops short of immersing the viewer in the depth of their precarity. As a result, their chosen paths seem abrupt rather than inevitable, weakening the emotional stakes the story aims to build.
Still, Ụmụnne succeeds in illustrating how poverty bends morality, how love can mutate into secrecy, and how even well-intentioned sacrifices can fracture familial trust. Sebastin’s film may not fully reach the emotional force it strives for, but it raises essential questions about survival, dignity, and the invisible wars waged within the poorest households.
She’s Got Courage to Love (Nigeria)
In a time when romantic disillusionment feels almost fashionable, She’s Got Courage to Love centres Sarah, a woman who refuses to surrender her optimism. She is, as the film paints her, a “lover girl”, undaunted by the cynicism surrounding contemporary love, still believing in soulmates and the possibilities of partnership. Director Tosin Jones initially builds a compelling character portrait, one that promises to explore what it means to seek tenderness in a world that often warns against vulnerability.
But the film soon begins to unravel, not because the themes lack resonance, but because the narrative loses focus. Though Sarah is positioned as the protagonist, the story frequently shifts its emotional attention to her best friend, Jemima—a lovelorn, overbearing figure whose unresolved trauma from past relationships threatens to eclipse Sarah’s journey.
Through Jemima, the film edges into themes of heartbreak, recovery, emotional baggage, and the labyrinth of healing. These are potent subjects, and Jones treats them with visible empathy. Yet this thematic expansion creates a tonal split: is this Sarah’s story about love, or Jemima’s story about healing? The film never makes a clear decision.
By the final scenes, the title She’s Got Courage to Love feels misaligned with the narrative emphasis. The film that emerges is closer to She’s Got Courage to Heal, a meditation on emotional repair overshadowing the original promise of romantic exploration.
Even so, Jones offers a tender portrait of female friendship: messy, needy, imperfect, but sustaining. And the film’s insistence that courage is required not just for love but for healing may be its most enduring insight.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.