Lagos Fringe Festival 2025: Loveth Ogbene’s “The Boy From The Window” Situates Love and Solace In Imperfections

With its premise of two youngsters and neighbours finding ways to love each other and share small, beautiful moments despite their individual sufferings, The Boy From The Window shows considerable merit. The story rouses emotions with its portrayal of teenage innocence, desire, suffering and a quiet sense of hope that offers solace in place of despair. Initially released as part of the Accelerate Filmmaker Project 2024, a programme designated to support and promote developing filmmakers in the Nigerian film industry, The Boy From The Window was available for screening at the recent edition of Lagos Fringe Festival which ran from 18th – 21st November, 2025.

In this film, Loveth Ogbene, also producer and director, plays Omonigho, a high school girl who lives with an aunt that maltreats and abuses her. One day, through the apartment window, she meets Mide, a boy who lives in a building next to theirs and seems to empathize with her. After a few more meditative window meetings, both become fond of each other and begin to spend physical time together. Their romance, though short-lived, is pure with childlike innocence, allowing them to momentarily escape from the encumbrances of their individual worlds.

Often, in contemporary films, romance is presented as a blissful and colourful experience between perfect or near-perfect individuals. The typical narrative involves a physically attractive, charismatic and relatively successful man taking interest in a beautiful and ambitious young lady who reciprocates the gesture. They spend time in fancy places, doing fancy things, buying fancy stuff. There are problems, but these problems are not ineradicable. Afterwards, the couple get to spend the rest of their lives together. This template has been used or slightly tweaked in Nollywood romcoms like A Lagos Love Story and Namaste Wahala. While this representation of romance is probable, it provides a skewed, one-sided perspective. It ignores what romance means to ordinary people in society, people with flawed looks, people from dysfunctional backgrounds, people with limited social and economic opportunities, people with bleak prospects. It also ignores what romance means to the teenager from a low-income family who resorts to simpler and covert ways of expressing desire. For the average financially struggling Nigerian who experiences romance in minute ways, the contemporary Nollywood romcom feels aspirational and idealistic.

Ogbene’s The Boy From The Window, however, dares to be different by establishing romance between two clearly flawed individuals. Mide, with average looks and a deteriorating health, suffers pain and psychological torture in the closet, an experience that remains hidden from Omonigho until his death. The girl, on the other hand, undergoes abuse and child labour, which often makes her sad at home as her face and skin bear the scars of her sufferings. Again, it does not seem like the young lovers can afford to visit interesting places or make their affair open, so they walk other each on the road and linger around an uncompleted building, playing games and talking.

Contrary to the typical “and they lived happily ever after” resolution of popular romantic tales, The Boy From The Window concludes with the lovers separated for eternity—Omonigho alive and Mide deceased—as the girl is left only with the choice to preserve the memory of their bond. Happily subtle and engagingly sad, the film peters out, reminding us that even amidst the ephemerality and brutality of human existence, love, hope and other noble desires offer a lifeline.