S16 Film Festival 2025: Rete Poki’s “Traces of The Sun” Confronts Institutionalised Performances of Love

African societies are popular for their communal arrangements where people are bound together in close-knit units such as family, peer groups and religious gatherings. Within such systems, duties are expected and responsibilities are distributed, and the very understanding of love itself emanates from one’s commitment to these realities. This is why, love, for many of the older generations, does not exist as an independent force devoid of responsibilities and expectations. A typical father and husband, by traditional standards, is thought to show love only when he bears the financial and security burdens of the family, even if that means being numb and emotionally distant from his wife and children. In a similar vein, the wife and mother is condensed into the role of a nurturer who cares for the children and a subordinate to her husband, ever submissive and never questioning the leadership and decisions of the man even if they constitute a threat to her personal growth and psychological wellbeing. The children are conditioned to “love” through complete obedience to their parents and the assumption of roles that alleviate the struggles of the family. It is these skewed ideas, indoctrinations and performances of love that Rete Poki’s Traces of The Sun antagonizes.

Traces of The Sun is packaged in documentary format and follows anonymous voices of young women from the present generation reassessing what love means to them. These voices draw from their personal experiences, relating the flawed ways in which the environment has taught them to love and demonstrating a will to break free from the societal indoctrinations. Though we do not physically meet the speakers, their voices seem to compensate for the graphic elision, typifying the iconoclastic nature of the younger generation of Nigerians that are wont to query structures that have outlived their heydays. The film’s polemical undertone quietly parallels that of Daniel Alaka’s About Sarah, a short animated film that also screened at this year’s S16 Film Festival, although the latter focuses more narrowly on romantic love and infatuation.

This directorial work of Poki’s stands out for its use of audio-visual disjunction, a filmmaking technique in which sounds and images are deliberately misaligned, so that what is being said does not directly correspond to what is being revealed on screen. Audio-visual disjunction is a cinematic style that subverts the conventional screenplay where there is consonance between audio and visuals. Both parts operate independently rather than corroborating each other, which elicits tensions, contrasts or an intriguing sense of irony. This style may be adopted in documentaries and experimental films to express memory, emotional truth, or project a subjective perspective, often uniquely empowering the unknown subjects or actors through voice-overs and dialogue.

Wielding this technique, Poki seems to be more interested beyond just momentarily engaging the audience for art’s sake but also immersing them in the central arguments around love, posing a discourse that is bound to continue when the film ends. It appears the visuals serve as a mental adhesive through which imprints around love, in its naked and unlicensed state, are made. From bearing a metaphoric title to having fragmented imagery and disembodied testimonies, Traces of The Sun feels like a gesture towards love as an evolving, self-defined and free-flowing experience, rather than a rehearsed social performance or an overregulated affair, teasing a rewrite of inherited scripts within the African society.