Traces of the Sun; About Sarah; Keys; My Jebba Story; Obi Is a Boy; Second Wind; Back to the Theatre Vox; Morning, Morning; Journeys of Singleness; 70 X 7; Mother; Òdè! There Is No Bus Stop on This Trip; and Song of Solomon.
By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku
If there is one thing that can be expected of the S16 Film Festival, it is that the concept of an independent film festival will be taken seriously. Audiences can be sure that, despite the modest lineup, they really will see a diverse slate of films, most of which will embody the kind of artistic experimentation that mainstream cinema does not quite allow space for.
The fifth edition of the S16 Film Festival reiterated those ideals, especially across its selection of short films in its shorts competition section. Featured here are films that screened in competition at the S16 Film Festival 2025: Traces of the Sun; About Sarah; Keys; My Jebba Story; Obi Is a Boy; Second Wind; Back to the Theatre Vox; Morning, Morning; Journeys of Singleness; 70 X 7; Mother; Òdè! There Is No Bus Stop on This Trip; and Song of Solomon.
Traces of the Sun
An interesting opening to the S16 Film Festival shorts competition section, Rete Poki’s essay film, Traces of the Sun, reflects on love in its many varieties. The film’s insights are conveyed through voiceover expositions by a multitude of unidentified women playing over a curation of evocative images and video clips. From familial to platonic, heteroromantic to queer love, Poki’s chosen voices confront the thoughts and emotions that they attach to their sharply contrasting experiences.
Much of the imagery is wholesome and soothing, sometimes juxtaposed with one recurring theme of love springing up in the midst of absence or abuse. But some of the accompanying clips are more triggering, though not jarringly so, with Poki employing creative means to indirectly portray the violent nature of abusive relationships, from the scientific process of diffusion that occurs in making a zobo drink to the violence of pounding yam.
Poki’s meditation on love, through the female voices, is often repetitive. And as creative as the imagery tends to be, it sometimes diverts attention from the essence of the essay itself. Yet, Traces of the Sun is an engaging experimental work. And the visual images of love and of its absence, as orally painted by the women who share their stories, are difficult to forget.
About Sarah
About Sarah, S.A.D. (pronounced “Sad”), Alaka’s delight of a film is a 2D stick-figure animated romcom of sorts that is as real as real gets. Narrated by Oshla Abimiku in a perfectly detached and soothing voiceover that sounds simultaneously dull and fascinating, Alaka’s protagonist is a young man with a censored name and conflicting thoughts about the concept of love.
He’s a writer writing a romance novel, though he hates romance. He’s also infatuated with a young woman called Sarah, whom he ordinarily is not attracted to but is also frustratingly drawn to. The result is a humorous and personal confession that feels semi-autobiographical, like a diary entry, or a tour around the complicated heart and chaotic brain of a cynic who is in love and in denial.
But About Sarah is not a mere comedy. Alaka attempts to dig deeper, delivering philosophical musings on love that are deliberately pretentious but sometimes turn out to be quite sensible. In one hilarious but contemplative sequence, the protagonist converts the theological belief that “God is love” into a mathematical equation in an attempt to solve for the tangibility of love.
Ultimately, Alaka’s leading stick-man decides that whether love is real or not depends entirely on each person. If that conclusion seems abstract or unimaginative, About Sarah is anything but. Rightfully, it earned Alaka the Rising Star Award at the S16 Film Festival 2025.
Keys
Theocracy and intergenerational trauma combine as thematic subtexts in Mooreoluwa Natasha Wright’s Keys, a small-scale contemporary horror confined within the walls of an old home. Keys has all the trappings of a classic horror. A secluded family. An oppressive household. A doll. A threatening entity behind a locked door. Even outdated home decor. It really is surprising that the film ends up feeling more weird than horrifying.
Amanda Oruh plays Bolanle, a young girl trapped at home with a hidden entity and her single father (Patrick Diabuah). Her father is training her to take over from him as master of the house—a psychological coping mechanism, since they are both practically slaves to that house—just as he took over from his own father.
To achieve this, he wields religion and isolation as tools for both protection and domination, subjecting her to biblical passages often taken out of context and locking her up in her bedroom, where her only companion is a doll she has limited access to. Of course, Bolanle will eventually seek freedom. The question is: at what cost?
Wright is able to build suspense and existential dread with the claustrophobic locations and the film’s tone. But the preoccupation with the subtexts and symbolisms becomes a source of distraction. It does not help that the performances in Keys are uninspired and under-directed, effectively lightening the film’s intensity.
My Jebba Story
The worthy winner of the S16 Film Festival 2025 Audience Choice Award, Kagho Idhebor Crowther’s My Jebba Story is a picturesque photograph of photographs and an incredibly moving homage to home. Composed almost entirely from old pictures and video clips taken a decade and a half ago, save for a closing clip that memorialises the present, My Jebba Story immortalises the director’s early days in the city of Lagos, particularly the cinematic Jebba Street where he lived and worked as a young street photographer at the start of his career.
At once a documentary, a photo film and an essay film—Crowther opens with a note that even he is not sure how to describe the format—My Jebba Story transports the audience to a vibrant, monochrome 2000s Jebba Street, inviting viewers into the vivid, exciting and humane world of the director’s humble beginnings. Through a spirited and sometimes introspective narrative voiceover, Crowther revisits the stories behind some of his best photos, from his first street photograph of the woman he would eventually call his wife to a group photograph that holds memories of life and loss.
Supported by music that is appropriately energetic or nostalgic as needed, My Jebba Story is raw, honest, and reflective. And it is immensely valuable. In a fast-paced era when moments are fleeting, when life has become a performance to be curated for viral content, and when humans rely on artificial intelligence to manufacture their likeness, My Jebba Story makes a case for real-time photographs and for a revival of the practically lost art of capturing moments in time.
Obi Is a Boy
Making a fourth appearance at the S16 film festival, 2024 Rising Star award-winner, Dika Ofoma, returns with another film that blends grief with the experiences of vulnerable people at the margins of society. His 2024 entry was God’s Wife, a quietly evocative film centring on an Igbo widow at the mercy of an abusive brother-in-law and a problematic custom.
This time, in Obi Is a Boy, which won the inaugural AFP Critics Prize at the 2025 S16 Festival, Ofoma turns his lens on a young, gender non-conforming male hairdresser mourning the loss of his mother while navigating a fraught relationship with his estranged father.
Unsurprisingly, the broader societal discrimination is explored in Obi Is a Boy, and Ofoma captures the casual violence that threads through life in a conservative society like Nigeria. But the film’s greatest strength, story-wise, is in its keen observance of the fragility of human relationships, made precarious by society’s prejudice and its tendency to tiptoe around conversations.
Ironically, in that strength also lies a weakness. In a bid to emphasise avoidance, the second act features an abrupt switch in the dynamic between Obi and his father, explained in passing by an offscreen conversation between Obi’s father and his aunt. With the audience deprived of that discussion, the small but essential growth feels jarring enough; it temporarily pulls the audience out of the intimate world that Ofoma and co-writer Blessing Uzzi have built.
Nevertheless, Ofoma directs the short with tenderness and restraint. The performances—from Uche Uba (in his acting debut) as Obi, to Ofiafuluagu Mbaka as the father, and Ebele Okaro as the aunt—are measured. Plus, Obi Is a Boy is excellent in the way it uses its technical elements, from shot composition and colour palette, to production design, wardrobe and hairstyling, to establish its mood, tone and messaging.
The film’s title is self-explanatory, but with added societal context, it feels weightier. For one, there is the definitive gendered categorisation of the name “Obi” that has long been ingrained in the collective consciousness, as exemplified in the popular saying, “Obi is a boy, Ada is a girl”, from a literature text that generations of Nigerians studied as early as primary school—little wonder that Obi’s bullies nickname him “Adaobi”.
On the other hand, a punchy use of the phrase implies exhaustion at having to repeat the same message over and over to a person who has failed to listen and grow: “Every day, Obi is a boy.” That, of course, is relevant here. Must Obi repeatedly justify his person to people who are determined not to understand?
Second Wind
In Second Wind, directed by Celestina Aleobua and Emmanuel Sochima Nwakaeze, two young friends (played by Aleobua and Juzar Dean) take a trip to a gorgeous countryside location for a photoshoot. At first glance, they seem like a photographer and his muse. But soon after, an unsolicited gesture sends the film in an unexpected direction. We learn they have only just reconnected after years apart, and they share a complicated sexual history that each party remembers differently. What ensues is a he-said/she-said confrontation where the film is unable to decide whether it wants to be morally ambiguous or take a clear stance.
Films of this nature, like the real-life circumstances they reflect, tend to feature a lot of gaslighting and increased inconsistency on the part of the characters as the narrative unfolds and the truth surfaces—if it ever does. But in Second Wind, it is not just the characters who are inconsistent, but the film itself. In attempting to breadcrumb the audience, Second Wind confounds itself, and instead of revelations compounding, they conflict. Accusations fly around, repeatedly met with denials or avoidance. Yet, when the supposed trump card appears, the film and its characters act as though the truth has been conclusively revealed, when it has not.
Where the film excels, though, is in its visual flair and in the camera and editing choices that underscore the characters’ psychological dissonance. But thematically, Second Wind barely scratches the surface of its sensitive subject matter. Good intentions cannot replace execution, not even in a film as visually striking as this.
Back to the Theatre Vox
A modest gem in this year’s selection, Back to the Theatre Vox, by Senegalese director Amina Awa Niang, blends an ode to cinema with a heartwarming tale of friendship and reconnection. In its opening scene, two boys get into a fight while playing football, but as children who are still innocent-minded, they quickly reconcile.
Unfortunately for them, the adults in their lives are not as forgiving. With a birthday invitation hanging in the balance, they discover that their grandfathers—a photographer and screenwriter—are lifelong enemies, harbouring exaggerated grudges over creative differences from their youth.
As it turns out, a film collaboration went wrong decades ago, along with the grand expectations they’d each had for their lives. “Ousmane Sembène would have seen the film,” one of them tells his grandson wistfully. And even worse, the once-great Vox Theatre, where it would have shown, is now as abandoned as their dream film. Enter the young friends who audaciously make it their mission to complete their grandfathers’ film, show it at the Vox Theatre, and repair a long-lost friendship.
Admittedly, Back to the Theatre Vox demands that the audience believe the unlikely. And yet, it is so earnest in its approach that suspension of disbelief feels considerably easier. Though it does not boast of great performances, the acting is passionate and sincere enough to be worth forgiving. Plus, it records more than decent filmmaking, with impressive camerawork, more than adequate scoring, an interesting filmmaking montage, and a heartfelt resolution. There’s resonance in its exploration of pride and regrets. And somewhere in there is a subtle acknowledgement of the benefits of technology in preserving and restoring cinema.
Granted, films about films are very easy to love. And perhaps, that sentiment plays a role in how pleasant Back to the Theatre Vox feels. But this film really does make a lot out of very little. That is something more experienced filmmakers struggle to do.
Morning, Morning
In the experimental, extra-sensual, mostly black-and-white Morning, Morning, first-time writer-director (and one of only two characters) Gozirimuu Obinna visualises a sexual dream as a means to explore romantic loss and the struggle to heal. It’s a silent film and an unusual but interesting experiment for modern Nigerian cinema, one that might be effective if its visual metaphors were not so corny and if it were not accompanied by cringey lines of poetry printed across the screen, interrupting the visual sequences.
It is so obviously provocative that it is barely able to be evocative. Of course, there’s a point it is making, about the emotional ache of heartbreak and the arduous process of moving on, but ultimately, one might be too cringed out to care.
Journeys of Singleness
Barnabas Ayo-Ilekhaize’s Journeys of Singleness televises the “crash-out” that follows a “ghosting.” That the film is titled Journeys of Singleness is quite curious. Perhaps the journey lies in the ups and downs of the singular talking-stage experience that Ifebuche, the film’s single lady, navigates. But even then, it would be a single journey. Or maybe the plural is meant to imply that this one young woman’s journey reflects the journeys of multiple women. But does it, though? Or is it a man’s fantasy of how completely dysfunctional women become after a one-week, phone-based, mostly casual talking stage goes bust?
When we meet Ifebuche, the persona she naturally projects, even to her best friend, is one of self-sufficiency. When her best friend sets out to matchmake her, she approaches it as a disturbance. Sure, she settles into the idea of this man on the phone, and she invests a good deal of that one week in conversations with him, but there is no indication of desperation or deep emotional investment on her part. So when his disappearance breaks her to the point of drunkenness and an inability to work, it really does come out of left field.
It might be more credible if the performances were strong and if the conversations were more convincing in establishing an emotional connection. But these are not elements that Journeys of Singleness excels at. The film puts the talking in the talking stage. Yet, the conversations are mostly bland, although a few talking points have some spark—like a brief sociopolitical critique that Ifebuche attempts around Sense8, the Hollywood series. And even after the talking stage crashes and burns, we are made to sit through a badly performed, rambling monologue from the best friend.
Still, Journeys of Singleness has some relevance in mirroring the digital nature of the modern-day dating scene, where people connect and disconnect through a device. Perhaps it is this underwhelming character of contemporary relationships that renders the film’s uninspired circumstances inevitable.
70 X 7
Many have considered the possibility of adhering to the strict wording of the biblical injunction to forgive seventy times seven, but leave it to Chiemeka Osuagwu to make a film out of it. Written by Tamara Aihie, 70 X 7 stars Uche Chika Elumelu as a recently divorced woman who has kept a list of her occasions of forgiveness since childhood and now refuses to forgive because she has fulfilled the quota Jesus mercifully assigned to each human.
As she now has to demand satisfaction from each offender, her behaviour draws the attention of her parish priest (Ejiro Badare), who is both dumbfounded and impressed. It is an inherently funny concept, and with Elumelu carrying the seemingly carefree but irritable persona with apt comedic timing—undeterred by the flat performance from her onscreen partner—what unfolds is an unsurprisingly hilarious back-and-forth as she rejects any counter-arguments that might render her lifelong project fruitless, and the priest himself begins to struggle with a major tenet of his faith.
A different filmmaker might have attempted a deeper character study, especially considering that the ingredients already exist in 70 X 7. The psychological toll it would take to keep track of every offence and be unable to let anything go is felt in the demeanour of the film’s lead. Yet, 70 X 7 ignores that extra layer, insisting instead on a resolution that reinforces its premise rather than confronts it. What could have been more ends up as a surface-level fascination with a concept that is itself more consequential.
Mother
Films are allowed to be provocative, but what purpose should such provocation serve? Mother, from directing-duo, Victor Daniel and Olamide Adio (What’s Left of Us (2025)), raises this question. The minimalist and mostly well-shot film set in Ibadan follows a pregnant tailor (Bisi Ariyo, in an inconsistent performance) and her father (Ropo Ewenla, wearing grief modestly but fiercely) as they continue to grieve the loss of their mother and wife, even one year after her passing.
Wherever they turn, there is someone there to praise the memory of this ever-present being who no longer is, or to praise them for how well they handle their grief. But behind closed doors, the burden of the loss is weighty. For the husband who no longer has the woman he depends on for his needs, and particularly for the daughter who has to fill the gap and lighten the load for her father.
There is something to be said about the domestic nature of the gaps that need filling, and how it is the father who needs his wife to be replaced, in some sense, while the daughter has no replacement for her mother. But this is not quite the focus of Daniel and Adio’s film, which is preoccupied with reflecting the most extreme thing two people grieving in close proximity can resort to in dealing with that grief.
What is especially interesting is that the subject of grief, how it is handled, and who bears the brunt of it, especially in a patriarchal society where women’s labour is an under-recognised societal requirement in the treatment of loss and grief, would have been more effectively explored if the charged closing sequence was not the primary goal of this film. Provocation may trigger audience response, but it will more likely, as it does in Mother, distract from the bigger picture of a film’s message.
Òdè! There Is No Bus Stop On This Trip
If there was ever a film that belonged at a Surreal16 festival, it would be Òdè! There Is No Bus Stop On This Trip, Donald Tombia’s surrealist dive into the economic realities of young Nigerians and the problematic mechanics of the country’s poorly regulated loan system.
Chukwu Martin stars as Ejikem, a young, financially incapable painter who takes out a loan from a corporate loan shark to celebrate his girlfriend’s birthday. Doris Okorie plays the girlfriend, Akumjeli (an Igbo name that ironically translates to “The wealth I will enjoy”), the one with a job that barely has boundaries but helps sustain them both.
Despite the loan, Ejikem cannot even afford the resort Akumjeli would prefer, so they settle for renting out a club to themselves—of course, this in itself is questionable, even in the world of the film—and spending the entire day in a psychedelic state, pumped with drugs. And we get to experience a wonderful visual and sensory trip that climaxes with the loan shark appearing to collect.
In the moment, Òdè! is a truly fascinating heck of a ride. But as soon as one wakes up from the trance, the film collapses under scrutiny. Storytelling choices are often too absurd, even in the film’s surreal context, only worth appreciating for the artistic intent. Other choices disrupt the visual flow and aesthetics, such as a flashback scene that serves a purpose which itself is ultimately unnecessary. And others, still, tip the surrealism over the edge, to the point of thematic confusion.
In one example, the film finds Akumjeli almost drawn in by what appears to be Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” (also known as “The Melting Clocks”), considered one of the most seminal works of surrealism. Dalí’s painting is intended to help discredit reality and also, as some have explained, to question the ineluctability of time.
At the S16 screening, Tombia linked the painting to Akumjeli’s biological clock. The question then arises: why would this film be interested in the biological clock of a woman whose pressures, as far as the film indicates, are related to her career, and not in the melting clock of the man whom the film establishes as under financial pressure?
Song of Solomon
In 2022, a Catholic church in Owo, a town in Western Nigeria, was attacked by armed men on Pentecost Sunday. Reports say at least forty people were killed and eighty others injured, in what is now known as the Owo Church Massacre. It is that horrifying experience that director Albert Enobong attempts to visualise for audiences in Song of Solomon, combining fictional elements and video clips from the real attack, though with some notable but unexplained changes—like the church being protestant, and the film’s primary focus on a pastor delivering an odd sermon couched in the language of a motivational speech.
But, Song of Solomon is hardly moving and offers little more than a sensationalised reimagination of an act of terror. If there are things Song of Solomon wants to say, or insights it wants to provide about the tragedy it depicts, none of those things truly translate to the screen.
Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a writer, film critic, TV lover, and occasional storyteller writing from Lagos. She has a master’s degree in law but spends most of her time watching, reading about and discussing films and TV shows. She’s particularly concerned about what art has to say about society’s relationship with women. Connect with her on X @Nneka_Viv