NollywoodWeek: Halima (Darasimi Nadi, Obara’M) is not like every other child her age. This much is clear from the opening frames. She struggles with attention. It is easy to mistake her for a mute. The only time we hear her speak is of a gibberish she says to a teacher who catches her solving advanced mathematics. The rest are sudden, defensive cries. At school, she is bullied, called a “witch,” “ekwensu.” Perhaps this explains the black eye she carries through the film. Halima is a difficult child to understand. Even her parents admit this when her teacher visits her family to suggest that Halima might be autistic.
“Are you saying my daughter is mad?” her mother, Amina (Nadia Dutch, Finding Nina), asks.
Only a few things excite Halima, at least that we’re told of, and the film wisely anchors one of them in football. She is almost always seen clutching a ball or watching neighbourhood boys play. This suggests a child whose interior life, though inaccessible to others, is rich with desire and focus. But even this emotional clarity the film gestures toward comes off struggled, unrealized. The question of Halima’s attachment to football is not explored, not the less discussed. It is clear that this is a short film, and yet, there is no forgiving for this oversight.
The introduction of Amina’s nightmare arrives without emotional preparation and leaves without consequence. One sees the promise of a psychological depth that ends up feeling unnecessary, another idea introduced into a film already struggling to organize its concerns. The same can be said of the film’s central conflict. The suggestion that Halima be taken to a special school—one that her parents cannot afford—sets up a compelling tension between care and capacity. But rather than build this conflict gradually, In Her Shoes accelerates too quickly into resolution.
Amina’s decision to marry Halima off to a Mallam just immediately after the nightmare and blaming her husband for their daughter’s conditions—“If you had not sold me all those stories, walahi, I would’ve still had my first love and wouldn’t have ended with someone like you…”—comes off less as a tragic inevitability and more as a narrative shortcut. It is a heavy turn, one that demands emotional weight, yet the film does little to earn it.
The father’s (Emmanuel Adex, All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White) resistance, though morally clear, is thinly drawn; he exists more as a function of opposition than as a fully realised character. He wants peace, yes, but the film does not allow us to fully understand the cost of that peace, or the moment he decides it is no longer worth keeping.
As a result, what should feel like a mounting crisis instead comes off as a series of loosely connected ideas: autism awareness, poverty, stigma, patriarchy, religious intervention, girlhood desire. Each is important, but Ella Chikezie’s short film does not integrate them into a coherent whole.
This lack of grounding becomes most visible in the film’s final sequence. On the day arranged for Halima’s marriage, she is dressed up, displaced from herself, standing by the window with a ball, watching neighbourhood boys play football. When her mother takes the ball from her after beckoning on her several times to come meet her new husband, Halima breaks into sharp screams. She runs away when her father intervenes.
What follows is meant to be liberating: Halima, ball in hand, running into open space, playing with a kind of abandon that borders uncomfortably on spectacle. A crowd gathers. The father finds her. He pulls her close and declares, with sudden conviction, that no one will take his daughter from him.
The emotional transition is too abrupt, almost confusing, the surrounding characters too inconsistently drawn.
The mother, who moments earlier was willing to give her daughter away, appears curiously untroubled (or troubled?—we’re not even sure what the look on her face suggests).
Still, there is something here worth holding onto. The image of a young Muslim girl in hijab, clinging to football as both refuge and identity is such an interesting premise. It suggests a story about autonomy, about the right to want, to choose, to exist outside the narrow definitions imposed by family, culture, or religion, but In Her Shoes never fully commits to this story. It gestures toward many things but settles into none.
Produced by Negodu Media, In Her Shoes screened at NollywoodWeek 2026.
Side Musings
- Halima’s black eye is so aggressively dark it stops looking like an injury and starts looking like a design choice. At some point, you’re less concerned about who hit her and more concerned about who painted her.
