Three films — from Nigeria, Uganda, and Egypt — stood out for their attempts to explore guilt, regret, responsibility, and becoming, each arriving at its own distinct emotional register.
By Joseph Jonathan
Short films often reveal their power in the small moments: the quiet confessions before violence, the split second between action and inaction, the brief flicker where a child’s fear becomes a mirror of society. At AIFF 2025, these compressed fragments of humanity took centre stage once again, offering filmmakers a space to examine emotional truths without the burden of spectacle.
Across genres and national cinemas, the festival’s shorts reminded viewers that the most resonant stories are not always the most elaborate, but the ones that use clarity, craft, and cultural insight to distil a single human experience into something urgent. Three films — from Nigeria, Uganda, and Egypt — stood out for their attempts to explore guilt, regret, responsibility, and becoming, each arriving at its own distinct emotional register.
Together Apart (Nigeria)
What would you tell someone you loved if you knew it was the last time you’d ever see them?
Damilare Williams-Shires builds his debut short film, Together Apart, around this simple but devastating question. The premise — two former contract killers, a man and a woman, hired to take one last job on each other — could easily have leaned into cliché or melodrama. But Williams-Shires instead uses it as a frame for something more intimate: a reckoning with missed opportunities and unspoken love. Before the violence they both expect must come, the pair sit together and revisit the long arc of their shared past, a past filled with longing that neither ever had the courage to name.
Across its 11-minute runtime, the film locates its emotional charge in conversation, a mix of confession, humour, regret, and resignation. The surprising charm in their exchange sustains the narrative, sketching two people whose hardened exteriors barely conceal the ache beneath.
Their dialogue, even when it falters or slips into overly neat phrasing, captures the unevenness of people trying to articulate too much too late. Their pauses, their hesitations, and their attempts to joke away the weight of truth all reveal what the words cannot fully hold.
The film avoids didacticism, yet its message settles quietly: the past, no matter how familiar or intoxicating, is not a place where a person can live. Moving forward demands an emotional severing that is often painful, but necessary. The contract killers’ last meeting becomes a metaphor for this: a recognition that to cling to what once was is to remain trapped in a cycle that has already ended.
What lifts the film is how the performances carry its philosophical undercurrent. The chemistry between the actors fills the short with a lived-in quality, anchoring the story even when the script briefly wavers.
Their faces — marked by affection, frustration, and resignation — carry the emotional clarity the runtime does not permit the film to verbalise. The result is a short that lingers, not for its violence, but for its tender portrayal of two people confronting everything they never allowed themselves to say.
Jimbi (Uganda)
Directed by Ugandan filmmaker, Tusabe Ivan, Jimbi follows Kisitu (Atuhaire Emmanuel), a young man who visits a nightclub and overhears a woman being sexually violated. Instead of intervening, he walks away: an act of silence that becomes the film’s entire moral engine. Soon after, he develops a strange wound that marks the beginning of his transformation into the mythical creature known as Jimbi. Forced to seek the help of a traditional healer, Kisitu must confront not only his physical disintegration but the guilt that catalysed it.
Across its 15-minute runtime, Ivan grapples with themes of silence, complicity, and the consequences that follow inaction. The decision to literalise guilt through folklore is one of the film’s most compelling choices, grounding the narrative in Ugandan myth while expanding its resonance beyond the cultural specific. Kisitu’s transformation becomes a symbolic punishment — a physical manifestation of a moral decay that began the moment he turned away.
Where Jimbi shines most is in its technical execution. Its production design creates a world that feels both contemporary and mythic, with carefully chosen details that blur the line between psychological horror and spiritual realism.
The special effects, especially the wounds and markings that spread across Kisitu’s body, are striking in their texture and detail. The cinematography uses colour, shadow, and perspective to mirror Kisitu’s growing internal panic, while the editing reinforces the tightening grip of guilt that traps him.
Emmanuel’s performance is quietly compelling; he brings a restrained and believable vulnerability to Kisitu’s unraveling. The film’s only major limitation lies in its brisk resolution, which arrives before the emotional and cultural stakes have fully exhausted their potential. Yet, even with this constraint, Jimbi remains a powerful examination of responsibility. It insists that silence in the face of violence is not a passive act but a form of participation; one that carries consequences no myth, healer, or ritual can fully erase.
I Can Smell a Rat (Egypt)
The story of David in the Holy Bible — the shepherd boy thrust into destiny — is often considered one of the greatest coming-of-age narratives ever told. While Maribel’s journey in Antonious Bassily’s I Can Smell a Rat is on a much smaller scale, the parallels are unmistakable. Both are figures pushed into roles they neither anticipated nor desired, asked to carry a weight that seems beyond their measure.
Maribel (Aisha Adel Sabet), 10, is unexpectedly told by her drama teacher that she must step into the role of Hamlet just two days before the school play, after the original actor falls ill. This sudden responsibility triggers the scariest night of her young life, one where her fears materialise in vivid, disorienting forms. The film traces her internal unraveling with a blend of realism and surrealism, capturing how immense and terrifying the world feels when one is small, unheard, and unprepared.
Like David, Maribel must confront a task far larger than her self-perception allows. And like David, she must navigate the pressure not because she asked for it, but because others have decided she must bear it. The film’s exploration of fear, expectation, and reluctant destiny becomes even more poignant when set against the apathy of Maribel’s family. Obsessed with football, particularly their beloved Al Ahly, they remain uninterested in her distress, dismissing her attempts to express herself. It takes a drastic act from Maribel before anyone finally understands the emotional storm she is grappling with.
This dynamic speaks deeply to broader social and cultural realities: the ease with which children’s voices are drowned out by adult preoccupations; the expectation that they should be resilient without being given the emotional tools to handle fear; and the way communities often overlook the interior lives of young people until crisis forces attention. The film deftly shows how children learn to translate fear into silence, and silence into endurance, simply because the adults around them have no room to listen.
Aisha Adel Sabet is extraordinary in the role. She moves with a grace, vulnerability, and presence that cannot be taught, carrying the weight of the film with natural ease. Her performance elevates the narrative beyond its familiar coming-of-age frame, turning Maribel into a character with remarkable emotional clarity.
I Can Smell a Rat is an important film not only because of its craft but because of its compassion. It reminds viewers that children’s fears are not trivial; they are often reflections of how society has failed to hear them. Bassily shapes these anxieties into a story that is tender, unsettling, and resonant — a quiet but urgent call to pay attention to the smallest, softest voices.
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.