Watch Ìfé at EhTV Network
Ife begins with a young woman in her bedroom looking herself in the mirror, sensually, holding her waist-length braids. In the next few frames, as she sits, views herself from different angles, stands, we get a strong impression of who she is as a person, the type of woman she could be. A WhatsApp message and she descends the stairs and, at the door, pauses, and opens it. It’s a visitor: a young woman, taller, hair shorter, and Ife is visibly smitten by her, Adaora. Their first meeting begins in shyness. Ife, a bad cook, tells Adaora that she eats her mother’s food, and Adaora asks if her mother doesn’t lecture her about learning to cook for her future husband, and Ife chuckles, determined: “My mom knows I’m never marrying a man.”
Ife is a landmark film in Nigerian cinema because it realistically depicts two women in love in a country with homophobic laws—the first such film to do so—a country with a culture of sexism that reduces women to marriage prospects for men. In the course of its 35 minutes, it gives the women agency, but also observes how these conniving, silencing factors, together with those of family, privilege, and individual will, brutally come to bear over two days of dialogue, teases, and, ultimately, an unexpected and tearing confession in one bourgie Lagos apartment.
The film arrives in an expanding context of art exploring LGBTQ experiences. Ten years after Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows (2005) became the first Nigerian novel to explore what it means to be gay, Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) did the same for lesbian experiences. In fashion came A Nasty Boy magazine. Film caught up when the activist group The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERS) released Hell or High Water (2017), a short feature about a pastor’s tussle between religion and desire, starring Enyinna Nwigwe and Daniel K. Daniel. It is refreshing that Ife, directed by Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim and produced by the activist group The Equality Hub founder Pamela Adie (the subject of Nigeria’s first documentary about being lesbian, 2019’s Under the Rainbow), skips that valley of struggle and climbs a hill of freedom. Read more via Folio