S16 Festival 2025: Dika Ofoma’s “Obi Is A Boy” Is A Gospel On Individualism and Identity Reclamation

Obi Is a Boy introduces us to Obinna, a young man returning home for his mother’s funeral, stepping once more into a house where he has previously been treated as an unwanted presence. His father, retrograde and blinded by his own prejudice, appears to tolerate him only for the duration of the rites, unwilling to speak with him at first. Though the scenes foster meditative silence and sparse discourse, they soon reveal that Obi’s effeminacy and queerness, his apathy towards performative masculinity, fuels his father’s disdain. The father-son friction is unmistakable even in their short-lived reunion, but the older man breaches this discomfort by giving his son small tasks. This includes Obi running an errand during which peers on the streets call him “Adaobi” and taunt him for his effeminacy. Eventually, the young man, cross-dressed in his late mother’s traditional attire and headgear, walks out of the house and mounts a motorcycle, leaving behind a stupefied father—an act of quiet defiance through which he asserts and reclaims his identity.

Dika Ofoma already has a heart for stories that reflect the simple yet thoughtful lives of ordinary Nigerians, zooming into their mundane affairs through what culture writer Shalom Tewobola once described as “contemplative style.” From God’s Wife, shouldering the unfair weight of cultural dictates to Something Sweet negotiating romance between an older woman and a younger man at the expense of societal permissibility, Ofoma seems to have made it a personal obligation to tell the kinds of stories rooted in realities that people are likely to overlook or shy away from. In Obi Is A Boy, the writer-director, with producer Blessing Uzzi, centers a short tale of youthful rebellion and progressive individualism through the perspective of a young man who must either assert his identity against the odds or cave in to familial and environmental pressures.

Obi Is A Boy employs a number of intriguing elements to push the narrative, the most prominent being its grounding in Igbo culture, with characters who converse entirely in the local language. This homage to tradition is corroborated by a mournful atmosphere and anti-melodramatic exchanges. Ofoma, in his familiar style, embraces the natural, poetic enigma that remains atypical of mainstream Nollywood, layering every action and sound with deliberate restraint but imaginative intensity. The audience are encouraged to muse over the nuances of the intra-family relationship and, in doing so, acquire an understanding of the circumstances that shape the uneasy father-son reunion.

In a world driven by herd-like conformity, Obi Is A Boy raises a counter-narrative that prioritizes selfhood amidst other variants of identity. Its thematization of queerness draws comparison with documentaries such as Ajay Abalaka’s Girl-Boy and Victor Njoku’s This Is Love which also lend credence to alternative forms of gender and sexuality. While the resolution of the film itself feels inorganic, with the motorcyclist appearing to show no surprise at seeing a man dressed like a woman, this indifference is perhaps better interpreted as a gesture towards the acceptance of nonconformist and deviant ideals, a gradual but implicitly significant shift from an atmosphere of unyielding conservatism to one of tentative openness. It proposes a society inching towards empathy, where the unfamiliar is not instinctively rejected or ridiculed but assimilated into the spectrum of humanity.