Russell Oru’s “The Day the Heart Died” Revisits FGM Silence

When filmmaker Russell Oru set out to make The Day the Heart Died, he was not looking for comfort. Instead, he was searching for truth: the kind that forces people to pause, sit with discomfort and, perhaps, finally speak about what they have avoided for years. The short film, which has just been accepted by the organizers of Film Africa Festival, runs for only a few minutes, but its weight is undeniable. At its core is a subject that spans centuries and generations in Nigeria: female genital mutilation, or FGM.

Oru’s film tells the story through an intimate, almost claustrophobic lens. Rather than tackling the practice in a sweeping, sociological frame, he places it inside a home, where love, fear, and duty collide. Nengi, the young protagonist, becomes the flashpoint of an argument between her parents, a father resistant to tradition and a mother clinging to it. In this small domestic space, the political becomes personal, and the cultural becomes deeply human. Oru understood that this approach would strip away abstraction and put the audience face to face with the raw emotional cost of silence.

The decision to use the short film form was deliberate. While a feature could have broadened the narrative, Oru saw the potential in a tighter canvas. “Short films leave no room for waste,” he explained during our conversation. “Every scene has to carry the entire weight of the story. In something as sensitive as FGM, that’s important — you can’t afford to lose the audience in unnecessary detours.” The constraint became a strength, forcing the storytelling into a distilled form where tension is felt in every pause, every glance, and every unsaid word.

For Oru, centering the family was not just an artistic choice but a cultural one. Too often, discussions about FGM are placed at the level of policy, statistics, or rural tradition, stripped of the real spaces where the decisions are made. By focusing on parents, he draws attention to the conflicts that happen behind closed doors, where a mother’s sense of duty to heritage may clash with a father’s desire to protect his child from harm. The film does not allow for easy moral binaries. Instead of framing one parent as a villain and the other as a hero, Oru crafts both with complexity. “In reality,” he said, “these decisions come from a place of love, even if that love is shaped by harmful tradition.”

That complexity is what connects The Day the Heart Died to a lineage of Nigerian films addressing harmful traditional practices. In 2014, Stephanie Linus’s feature Dry brought issues like child marriage, and the wider implications for women’s bodily autonomy, to the big screen, using a dramatic, socially conscious lens to challenge cultural norms. Where Dry stretched across multiple storylines and communities, Oru’s film works like a scalpel, cutting directly into the tension of a single household. Both films share a refusal to treat such practices as distant history. In Nigeria, where UNICEF estimates that at least 20 million women have undergone FGM, the subject is still urgent, still living in the present tense.

Silence plays an unusually large role in Oru’s work. He uses it as both a narrative and visual device, the awkward stillness at the dinner table, the muffled voices behind a door, the way a character averts their gaze instead of speaking. In many Nigerian communities, FGM is not something openly debated; it is either accepted as a cultural destiny or quietly avoided. Translating that into a short film meant allowing the camera to linger on moments that might be considered too small in other stories. Oru’s gamble is that those moments will feel bigger than any speech.

Bringing such a film to life as an independent Nigerian filmmaker required more than vision. It demanded persistence in the face of logistical and cultural hurdles. Funding, always a major obstacle, was made harder by the subject matter. “Some potential backers worried about the backlash,” Oru revealed. “They asked if it was really necessary to bring up FGM again. My answer was simple — as long as it still happens, it’s necessary.” Working with a lean crew meant everyone had to stretch themselves, and the actors — led by William Benson, best known for To Kill a Monkey—had to carry the emotional weight without the cushion of elaborate sets or effects. The constraints became part of the film’s authenticity.

Acceptance into Film Africa Festival is more than just a career milestone for Oru; it is a validation that stories like this can resonate beyond their immediate cultural context. But he quickly points out that the real measure of success will not be found in festival applause. “If this film gets screened in schools, in community halls, in spaces where girls and parents can actually talk about it, that’s where the change happens,” he said. For him, the short form is an asset in this mission — it is easier to program into workshops, easier to screen at advocacy events without demanding hours from participants.

There is an urgency in his voice when he speaks about impact. Oru sees the short not as the end of the conversation but as the spark. In his mind, it should sit alongside documentaries, community theatre, and even casual kitchen-table discussions, all chipping away at the silence that allows FGM to persist. He knows that art alone will not erase a practice so deeply embedded in identity and tradition, but he also knows it can move the needle in ways policy briefs cannot.

In making The Day the Heart Died, Oru has stepped into a difficult space where artistic expression, cultural critique, and social advocacy overlap. The film’s brevity makes it accessible, its intimacy makes it personal, and its subject makes it impossible to ignore. Watching it, you are reminded that while laws and policies can be passed in a single day, the deeper work of shifting minds and hearts happens in much smaller rooms, often between just two people, often over something as ordinary as a family meal.

The story may be fictional, but the emotions are not. They belong to the countless families across Nigeria wrestling with the pull of tradition and the push of change. They belong to the girls whose futures hinge on decisions they cannot yet make for themselves. They belong to the parents who must weigh the cost of preserving heritage against the price of harm. And they belong to filmmakers, like Russell Oru, who choose to enter those rooms, camera in hand, ready to capture what happens when the heart dies and, perhaps, when it begins to live again.