S16 Festival 2025: Gozirimuu Obinna’s “Morning, Morning” Pays Homage To An Older Cinematic Era 

Art possesses an undeniable capacity for timelessness, effortlessly straddling multiple eras at once. A literary text, film or piece of music, despite being produced in a contemporary period, may hint at or portray a significant aspect of the history of a person or society. For example, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of A Yellow Sun and its film adaptation of the same title, directed by Biyi Bandele, were released in 2006 and 2013, respectively, yet both reflect the tensions of the 60s in Nigeria’s neophyte stage of post-independence rule up culminating in the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). It is a similar case for To Adaego With Love, which portrays ethnic tensions following the civil war, Mzansi Magic’s epic series Shaka iLembe, which ponderously delineates the history of the storied Zulu king, or the many other historical projects that populate the African film and television ecosystem. Morning, Morning, a two-character short film written and directed by Gozirimuu Obinna, holds a nostalgic and surrealist reputation, experimenting with the aesthetics and style of the ancestral silent cinema era.

The eight-minute dialogue-free film is set in a dreamscape and briefly addresses the hiccups of modern romance, suffused with themes of love, dashed hopes and a feeling of disappointment. It follows a young man momentarily stuck in a dreamscape where, despite being in intimate proximity with a female lover, he struggles to overcome the emotional friction between them. The plot is not explicit, and the lovers do not have a real conversation, but the silence and tensions suggest an atmosphere of unhealed pain and grudges. It appears the relationship has hit a rock in real life, whereas the young man is yet to get the memories out of his mind. Through this film, Obinna, as a filmmaker, is not just avoidant of synchronized dialogue and the normative elements of consumable mainstream cinema. He reconciles with the foundations of filmmaking and aims for a cinematic renaissance.

Morning, Morning bears the hallmarks of a silent film: visual storytelling, black and white imagery, title cards, expressive acting that dwarfs verbal language, and a musical accompaniment. The use of black-and-white monochrome with other cinematographic techniques equips the film with a dream-like ambience, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy and presenting a perspective of how the human mind may process information and desires, including love and heartbreak. A swift transition to colour pictures, however, happens in the final scene where the young man, morose and contemplative, awakens from sleep. Poetic title cards appear intermittently throughout the film, as a replacement for dialogue and contextual illustrations for the scenes. While the acting is not overly sentimental, it happens at a theatrical and seemingly calculated pace that hints at an emotional dilemma and simulates the outlook of a stage play.

The silent film is an art form that dates back to the 19th century, following a series of motion picture innovations. In 1888, Thomas Edison, working together with his assistant and protégé Dickson, invented the kinetograph, an early tool of motion picture technology, acting on previous inventions and experimentations. This primitive camera, which marked the birth of cinema, seemed to inspire the rise of Frenchmen and brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière who jointly developed a superior camera to Edison’s, with which they made silent short films between 1895 and 1905 and became one of the earliest filmmakers the world produced. The most influential figure of the silent film era is English comic actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, known for his Tramp persona, with his popular films being The Gold Rush and The Kid. Between 1890 and 1927, thousands of silent films were developed and released, as was the norm, with the productions prioritizing gestural and character-driven performances.

With Morning, Morning, Obinna demonstrates an avant-garde flair that is provocative, beckoning to history, but also rethinking a unique direction for Nigerian and African cinema. It will be myopic to scapegoat the film’s focus on aesthetics over narrative clarity, for its experiment is deliberate: Obinna resists the temptation of plot-heavy storytelling in favour of a sensory experience that foregrounds mood, memory and emotional texture. Doing so, he launches a space for contemporary filmmakers to reconsider the expressive possibilities of silence, minimalism and visual poetry within African cinema.