Port Harcourt may not be a hub for regular film activity, but it holds urgent, overlooked stories, and filmmaker Olohije Oyakhire believes those narratives deserve intentional cinematic engagement. Her vision is straightforward: build a steady, intimate space where film lovers, creatives, students, and curious audiences can meet to watch films and discuss them beyond their entertainment appeal.
To kickstart that dream, she introduced VISIONS, a film society to host film screenings and discussion projects dedicated to connecting audiences in Port Harcourt with cinema from the Global South. The inaugural edition held in partnership with the Alliance Française and Art in The Garden City (an initiative aimed at restoring and celebrating the connection between creativity, culture, heritage, the environment, and the creative economy) screened two short films that explored a shared theme of home and belonging in third spaces, though approached through different lenses, from different perspectives.
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The featured films were Journey Mercies, a short fiction film by Tomisin Adepeju, and Chez Jolie Coiffure, a documentary by Rosine Mbakam. Though different in genre and style, both films still tether towards the same theme, interrogating what home means when one is no longer standing inside it.
Journey Mercies introduces a Nigerian man living abroad, yearning for the physical home he and his wife struggled to build back in Nigeria after raising their children in the UK. Chez Jolie Coiffure follows a Cameroonian woman running a small hair salon in Belgium, after crossing deserts and waters for years in search of stability—still undocumented, still running from immigration officers, still building hope with her bare hands.
According to Olohije, the choice of films was guided by urgency. Conversations around japa continue to dominate everyday Nigerian life, and Nollywood has consistently captured this reality in film since its presence became impossible to ignore. There is Eyimofe, and there is A Japa Tale, amongst many others. “I wanted two films that talked about home, but from two different perspectives—one yearning to return home and the other leaving where they know as home to carve another for themselves in a strange place.”
Both films challenge the assumption that movement equals liberation. In reality, home can be a destination, a memory, a burden, or something that no longer exists. In her programme note, Olohije writes: “These films also explore the concept of a third space,” where she further defined it as “a cultural space that feels like a world in between the countries of origin and the countries a person has relocated to.”
Sitting in the audience—which I found had quickly thickened when I turned back—it became clear that the two films were not about travel, but about return, even when return is impossible or hindered. This set the tone for a conversation that quickly grew emotional, political, generational, and deeply personal.
One audience member, belonging to what he called the “boomer generation,” admitted that his generation may have contributed to the collapse that produced today’s mass migration culture. According to him, Nigeria was once a place people dreamed of returning to, but now it is a place people dream of escaping from.
Culture writer and researcher, Ikenna Churchill, also present, framed home differently. “Home isn’t only a place we come from, but a place we return to inside ourselves,” he contributed.
Sitting there, I found myself circling the same question: if home is no longer where you live, and not necessarily where you were born, and not always where you are welcomed, is home simply wherever your body stops fighting?
One finds by watching the films that both characters are still in transit: one emotionally, the other legally and physically. And sometimes that is the closest definition many of us can offer. Perhaps it is that home is wherever we are allowed to breathe without negotiation.
VISIONS positions itself as an alternative critical film-thinking environment. According to previously reported interviews, Olohije intends for the platform to introduce Port Harcourt audiences to cinema from Africa and Latin America regions that share similar histories of displacement, reinvention, and survival.
The first outing suggests that there is an audience for it, and more importantly, a hunger to talk, process, and argue, not only to watch and go home. Olohije repeatedly expressed her surprise, considering the crowd that had pulled up for the inaugural event. It wasn’t near her imagination that a first run of the screening would garner people nearing a hundred. If I’m permitted to speak on the behalf of everyone in attendance, the screening was worth the while, fun, and a good space to network with co-creatives.
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