#FILMFRIDAYS: Eyimofe
Year: 2022
Directors: Chuko & Arie Esiri
A recurring point of advocacy in this blog is pleading with Nigerian films to be patient. To let their cameras and characters wait. To allow the audience to stop and hear the silence. To understand that a film can and should be bigger than its story.
In my recommendation for Minari I wrote:
One of (Modern) Nollywood’s greatest sins is a weird aversion to nuance — an impatience with detail and character usually for the sake of moving the plot along. But it is the little things that drive and endure culture — these small explorations that connect us in very big ways. Films like Minari should remind us that the Nollywood game-changer that we have all been waiting for might not be a loud 3-hour crime epic but a small and silent film that contains extended scenes about a Lagos family making Egusi with no meat for dinner.
In Eyimofe, the Esiri brothers attempt to do all this and much more. In their feature-length debut, they tell the stories of Mofe and Rosa, two struggling, low-income Lagosians working to leave the country and the hurdles and compromises that they meet and make on the way to doing so.
There are many things that strike me about this film. One of them is a very vivid and empathetic presentation of the Nigerian working class. Unlike many Nigerian films that try to poorly approximate an understanding of class relations and the “real” lives of low-income Nigerians, Eyimofe actually attempts to meet these complex, colorful characters where they are and for the most part, stays there.
This means that the cinematography is grainy and grounded in a way that present Lagos as a living, breathing character in itself. But there are also very intentional narrative triumphs. The characters spend most of the movie tragically negotiating with different agents of the city for their survival and ultimately their freedom. All this is portrayed and achieved in a way that you rarely see in Nigerian cinema.
But perhaps the most important of Eyimofe’s virtues is that it waits. It waits for a generator to be fixed, for a POS transaction to be retried, for a grieving man to express silent rage at a greedy, incompetent system, for relatives to finish eating soup before begging for money. There is some (good) music but most of the sound is provided by the city of Lagos: buses, industrial machines, churches, generators, markets, streets.
Ultimately, Eyimofe is about a particular flavour of the Nigerian dream. One that asks you to beat the system by failing successfully. One that puts you in a sticky situation and asks you to make the best of it. It explores and explains the constraints that lead to forced contentment for millions of Lagosians.
Like with any movie, it is not perfect. There are certain moments that are undercut emotionally by too much restraint (and/or I suspect budget limitations). But these faults are few and honestly fair from first-time filmmakers. I am very excited about what the Esiri brothers decide to do next and have renewed optimism about the future of Nigerian cinema.
Eyimofe is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
