Can much be made in under 9 minutes? Surely, a painting which took months to complete is summarised in a few minutes by the viewer. In the “Live Action Short Film” category of this year’s Oscars, there was Misan Harriman’s 16-minute-long The After (starring David Oyelowo), a tragic story of a man who loses both daughter and wife in a single day to knife violence in London. But the short film barely captures the range of grief that attends such an experience. It largely is a motion picture narrative of inverse therapy-speak, bromidic and flat. The short film form is like a poem, demanding a level of interiority to accomplish. And there’s no better time in history than today to proclaim that not everyone is a poet.
In Ugochukwu Onuoha and Dika Ofoma’s Nkemakonam we are miles from London, in historical Ugwueke, a village in Abia. In the first few seconds, a man chases his daughter from his house because she has become pregnant. He says, “I will not let you bring shame into this household.” In a panoramic shot, we see the girl (Ndidi-Betty Agbo) in simple clothing—a wrapper over her bust and a head tie—pushed to the ground; she rises and takes off. In the next scene, which takes place nearly 9 months later, a town crier (Uzochukwu Nnadi) announces a ritual procession by the initiates of the Ogbu cult happening that night. It is also the day the Ogbu priest will announce his successor. He warns, “Let no one’s voice be heard tonight. Let no woman be seen outside. Let no man touch his wife.”
In the next and final scene, all his warning is unheeded. The girl, now in labour, screams in her ordeal of delivering her baby in a shelter. A masquerade walks in on her but remains silent. She begs for life, pleading, that a man had gotten her pregnant before he could see her parents for her betrothal, but then disappeared. When the masquerade takes off its mask, she sees it is her disappeared lover, Okalandu (Daniel Ngozika). It turns out he is likely one of the Ogbu initiates. He begs to hold the child but she refuses. But after a while—a compromise, and in faith—she asks him to name the child. When he puts his mask back on his voice changes and she realises—it comes as an epiphany—that the masquerade is Ogbunabali, the Igbo deity of death, who has visited her.
Is it an honour to have been visited by this deity? Or to be spared by death itself? Was it really her lost lover she saw? What are the roles of Okalandu who switches from being an incarnation of a deity and her lover and vice versa? Had Ogbunabali, as infamous with gods, taken human form to bed the girl? The metaphors mount. What are the directors, Ugochukwu Onuoha and Dika Ofoma, up to?
It is a near-perfect short movie. The questions here are about fate. Coincidences even: how they sometimes make an irony of life or simplify its complexities. Is it possible that Okalandu is the new Ogbu priest? We see the realisation on the girl’s face too—and she has to live with this. But even more, this short séance of a movie aims a criticism at affording the luxury of tradition: for whom does tradition exist?
Society—since man began to live in communities or have totems of beliefs—has been a long journey of oppressions. We all get a slice in our most unsuspecting minute, no matter how loyal we have been as custodians of tradition or the mores of our tribe. But what is hardly confronted is that the price for the convenience of tradition isn’t always worth it. It is in a twist of expectation, by following tradition, that Okalandu, an Ogbu initiate, abandons the girl, claiming, “I didn’t bring this on myself. Ogbunabali does what pleases him.” None of this makes sense to the abandoned mother, of course. And, is this story not familiar? As it is in such cases, young, out-of-wedlock mothers like her, left on their own, hinge the future on the new life (child) brought into the world as hope and meaning. Here, we find the name of the movie Nkemakonam—“I will not lack what is mine”—reflected.
Ndidi-Betty Agbo who plays the unnamed girl is obviously the spine of this short film, delivering a memorable performance in a remarkable few minutes. There’s interiority here, the poetry works, we are made to think, we unravel something new we missed in our first or second viewing. This is what original means.♦
Edited by Divine Inyang.
Watch Nkemakonam here.
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Carl Terver has a BA English from BSU, Makurdi. He is the author of the photobook Glory to the Sky.