Masquerade (Egúngún)
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Virtual streaming available in the U.S. from 9/16 12:00 AM EDT - 9/29 11:59 PM EDT.
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Description
Dir. by Olive Nwosu
Nigeria | 2021 | Drama | 15 min
In search of healing, a young woman returns home, to Nigeria, the country of her birth.
Director's Bio
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Olive Nwosu (she/her) was a BAFTA-Pigott 2020 Scholar, Alex Sichel Fellow at Columbia University, and an ‘African Promises’ director selected by the Institut Français. Nwosu’s work is informed by the intersectional nature of her life across multiple continents and identities. Her mission is to tell urgent, cinematic, African stories. She is a 2022 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow. Her short films, Troublemaker and BIFA-nominated Masquerade, have played worldwide at festivals including TIFF, Sundance, LFF, Clermont-Ferrand and the Hamptons, where it won Best Narrative Short 2021.
Director's Statement
" Egúngún was born from a desire to investigate my own feelings on the notion of ‘Home’ – as place and as construct, a space where we can be ourselves. A wanderer myself, who has lived in different identities and places, it’s a question I often grapple with: the sense of different lived selves, and possibilities of selves. How Fate takes us down one road – and what other versions of a life are out there. I tried to explore this feeling with the characters of the two women. Salewa embodies one version of the displaced, the Other, in search of a dream that can never quite be realised. Her whole life, a part of herself has always been hidden. She has always been masquerading. At home in Lagos, her sexual identity was hidden. In London, married to an English woman, her nationality, her Nigerianness, has been erased. She yearns for a self that often feels imaginary. In contrast, at home in Nigeria, Ebun too is masquerading. But unlike Salewa, she might have stopped yearning. She has accepted what is, and has put what could (have) be(en) behind her… At least, until the two women meet. Often, circumstances dictate these things. In this way, I think the film is a meditation on identity and memory and duty. And really, on the injustice, randomness, and beauty of it all. Hopefully, it’s also about a kind of healing – of Past, of Self, of Ego, after a long time of masquerading. An ode to acceptance and letting go."
- Olive Nwosu