Review: HumAngle’s Short Film Paints The Ugly Picture Of Terror In The North-East

The Displaced is a short film by HumAngle, a daring media platform founded in 2020 to provide concise coverage of a myriad of interconnected issues, especially involving conflict and terror, economic instability and humanitarian problems in Africa.

But there are a multitude of publications, in print and electronic media, with a similar scope and vision. Where HumAngle distinguishes itself is in its reporting of these incidents—always victim-focused, always life-sized and intimate, and not zoomed out to report in overarching statistics. These principles prop up The Displaced, a project done with the support of the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, like legs on a table, and they are the reason why this 20 minute film following a single family is a more detailed appraisal of the violence in North Eastern Nigeria than numbers on a spreadsheet.

The displaced uses simple style animated film to follow the story of Musa and his family. Theirs is, at first, a simple but peaceful life. Baban Musa, like the majority of the North Eastern people, is a farmer, and Maman Musa, Musa and his sister, Mairo all contribute to farm work. The surrounding communities are plagued by terror attacks, and with each day the threat on the horizon draws nearer. Finally it comes. An attack eventually happens, and in it, Musa’s father is killed, his mother raped, and Musa is taken away by the insurgents. That is sadly, only the start of their problems. 

At the IDP camp in Maiduguri that they settle in after a long journey, Mairo and her mother suffer the effects of a bitter concoction of religious and cultural misogyny that essentially regards women as lesser beings. With no men to speak for them they will be starved of food and much-needed medicine by corrupt officials at the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp that would rather make a profit selling them than give them to women. Pushed to a wall, Mairo is left with no choice but to sleep with one of them for food and medicine, a sordid option many of the women are forced to take. Musa in the terrorist camp is faring quite badly too, and after he is indoctrinated to become a member of their cell, he participates in sprees of violence similar to the one that brought his capture.

The short film is HumAngle’s first of its kind and the product of months of effort. It is non-specific in its use of ‘terrorist’ without pointing to any one group, assumedly because the terror groups that plague North Eastern Nigeria are equally myriad. Narration is pristine, and Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, the HumAngle reporter who narrates, is careful to keep her voice even during the most grievous announcements. It adds a bit of weight to these moments, because it reflects just how casually these atrocities take place in real life, and because the writers want to portray and not dramatise. 

The morose, pensive soundtrack adds an emotional paint to the canvas, conveying hope and despair when they are experienced by our protagonist’s family in a manner that, also, is not overdone. Watching the film, one is left with the obvious question as to whether this family have not suffered equal or perhaps even greater evil at the hands of the people who are to protect them. It is an angle that needed to be included, to show how one victim (mostly men) will take further advantage of weaker victims (mostly women and the poor) even after they have shared the same extenuating circumstances, and those people may even be government officials or soldiers. In all of war, one of its most devastating psychological effects comes from being violated by the same people you trusted to protect you.  

Even as painstakingly accurate as the displaced is, its writers cannot bring themselves to end on a realistic note for Musa and his family. They go with an optimistic one, where Musa is reunited with his family at long last, his mind purged of his terrorist indoctrinations. Sadly that is hardly the case in real life, but after all Musa and his family have been through, perhaps they deserved that ending. The mission is accomplished regardless: to show the effects of terror in the Northeast as simply and humanly as possible. So if you ever see a headline quoting a number of people displaced by a terror attack, remember that Baban Musa father is being killed, Musa has been kidnapped and Mairo and Maman Musa are being raped. What are we going to do for them?