Traces Of The Sun
S16 Film Festival: Directors working in the ten-to-thirty-minute range for short films can fracture time, dissolve narrative causality, or abandon dialogue entirely, treating form itself as the primary subject rather than a vehicle for plot. The best of these experiments rewire how we experience duration, memory, and perception on screen.
With Traces of the Sun, Rete Poki leans hard into that freedom. Across ten minutes, he splinters a single theme into non-linear shards: lovers whispering to each other, an artist painting a portrait of two queer women in love, sepia-toned memories of loving parents, and even the quiet private moment shared between a woman and her brother. There is no traditional story here—only echoes of love in its parental, romantic, and fraternal shades, stitched together by female narrators whose voices drift between tender recollection and near-obsessive philosophising. Each woman in her own extended meditation, reaffirming what love means to them.
But, at times, these overlapping soliloquies tip into excess, circling the same ache until it risks numbness. In the end, what lingers mostly is the unmistakable warmth of Poki’s vision as though every of those women’s heart were a photograph you can’t quite bring into focus, but can’t look away from either.
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Obi Is a Boy
Dika Ofoma’s short film Obi Is a Boy is a quiet, devastating gut-punch. The film tells the story of the titular character Obi, a young, effeminate man returning home for his mother’s funeral. Between him and his newly widowed father hangs an estrangement so complete that words feel forbidden. Ofoma rations dialogue like precious salt and his characters, as always, speak volumes with their silence. What little is spoken between father and son, it does nothing to lift the tension that exists between them.
The film unflinchingly charts how swiftly disapproval can curdle into violence against a queer, effeminate body in Africa. Yet resistance here is not loud; it is deliberate, almost tender. In the film’s most powerful moment, Obi walks to his late mother’s wardrobe, lifts out her crimson ichafu (gele) and buba, and dresses himself in them. He glides past his father—stricken, speechless—and mounts an okada that carries him away. In that single, wordless act of adornment and departure, Obi refuses erasure.
Dika Ofoma’s Obi is a Boy won the inaugural AFP Critics Prize award at the 2025 S16 Film Festival.
My Jebba Story
Kagho Idhebor’s My Jebba Story defies categorisation. From its opening disclaimer, it slips between documentary, photo-essay and narrative non-fiction, never quite settling. Shot in stark black and white, Idhebor transforms Jebba Street, a bustling area in Lagos, Nigeria into a living, breathing microcosm of the city’s relentless chaos, almost surreal in its raw intensity.
Idhebor’s hawk-eyed lens captures every cracked wall, every fleeting glance, with merciless clarity. Each face under his gaze carries an entire biography; traders, children, wanderers, all move with a reckless abandon yet an earned, almost regal grace. Beneath the dust and noise pulses a deep nostalgia—an aching love letter to a place that holds so many memories and longings.
Kagho Idhebor’s My Jebba Story won the Audience Choice Award at the 2025 S16 Film Festival.
Keys
In a spare, almost suffocating frame, this minimalist psychological horror traps a teenage girl in devotional isolation under her abusive, religious father. Her only confidant is a porcelain doll. But girls like her with quiet fire in their eyes must drink from a well of their own curiosity. When her rebellion leads her to a forbidden door, she unleashes an ancient entity that possesses her.
Was this what the poet meant by freedom is leaves learning to fall just to get trampled and bruised? One thing I admire about this film is how it builds tension from mood, lighting and situation. There’s the presence of that atmospheric dread that pervades horror films, a foreboding that something bad is lurking in the corner, only that unfortunately, the film turns out to be more creepy than scary soon afterwards.
The filmmaker Mooreoluwa Wright’s direction, though visually assured, often feels unsure of its own convictions, drifting rather than striking. The actors’ performances too barely rise above stiffness.
About Sarah
In S.A.D. Alaka‘s debut short film, About Sarah, a young man recounts his fleeting romance with the enigmatic Sarah through a stark animation lens.
But the execution falters. The narrative meanders in tepid boredom, its hollow dialogue echoing like scripted small talk devoid of spark or subtext. The romantic allure of the story soon dissolves into muted, almost clinical detachment, and the protagonist’s introspection feels flat. The animation storytelling technique, while innovative, saps gravity from the emotional core of the story, draining whatever potential the story has of energy.
S.A.D. Alaka won the Rising Star Award at the 2025 S16 Film Festival.
The 5th edition of the S16 Film Festival took place in Lagos from Dec 1-5.
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