The first thing you notice in Mother isn’t its story; it’s the quiet. The film opens with Ibadan alive in the distance: bus conductors calling out stops, the hum of traffic, the rhythm of ordinary life. Inside a small tailoring shop, Omowunmi(Bisi Ariyo) works at her sewing machine. Her fiancé, Sanni (Iyanu Ajibike), arrives with fruit, teasing her gently. It feels like the beginning of a simple love story, until silence fills the frame.
Directed by Olamide Àdìó and Victor Daniel, Mother is a ten-minute short inspired by a true story that unfolds slowly without fanfare. Its picture quality is crisp yet intimate, and its sound design is steeped in the language of Ibadan: the chatter of vendors, the soft thrum of a generator, and the steady pulse of life moving on.
Beneath that calm, the film reveals a quiet transgression. Omowunmi’s father (Ropo Ewenla) shares a forbidden intimacy with his daughter. However, the film never names it aloud. It’s only suggested through gestures, pauses, and looks that linger too long. That restraint, refusing to sensationalize or condemn, makes Mother so unsettling.
“A film usually tells you what it wants to be,” Àdìó tells me. “From its inception, Mother was always going to be a slow, reflective film. So much within that world depends on nuance and gesture.”
Daniel adds, “The subject isn’t light; so, we had to treat it with care. Using silence as a plot device was the only way to let the audience sit with the weight of what they’d just watched.”
Knowing that Mother is drawn from an actual event deepens its ache. The directors walk a moral tightrope, one that could easily tip into voyeurism, but they never lose sight of humanity. Their decision to tell this story through suggestion, rather than spectacle, aligns Mother with a lineage of truth-inspired films that explore grief and moral collapse through stillness.
Like Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Lingui, The Sacred Bonds or Akin Omotoso’s Tell Me Sweet Something, both rooted in personal or social truths, Mother takes something unspeakable and gives it quiet space to breathe. And like Abba Makama’s Green White Green or Damilola Orimogunje’s For Maria Ebun Pataki, it locates the tragedy not in noise, but in the silence of ordinary lives.
What unfolds here is not a story of sin but of grief misdirected. The father, unable to let go of his late wife, begins to see her reflection in his daughter. Omowunmi’s tender care, her questions about his medication, and the meals she cooks become an unconscious echo of the love he lost. The forbidden act, implied but unseen, is less about desire than about a heart unable to distinguish mourning from affection.
“Mother isn’t a story that benefits from spectacle,” Àdìó says. “The audience’s imagination is far more powerful than anything we could show.”
Even the film’s setting—the tailoring shop, the modest dining space, and the gossiping church women—anchors the story in a real, Nigerian world. These details keep Mother grounded in the texture of everyday life, where grief and gossip coexist.
“They’re the voice of society,” Àdìó explains. “They carry judgment into spaces that were once private.”
As collaborators, Àdìó and Daniel move like one voice. “The most important part of collaboration happens before we get on set,” Àdìó says. “That’s where we agree and push back on ideas.” Daniel adds, “By the time we’re shooting, we understand each other’s instincts. There’s trust—and that trust shows on screen.”
Their partnership places Mother within a growing current of Nigerian cinema that explores the moral interior, the quiet, complicated emotional landscapes where guilt, love, and duty blur. Films like Abba T. Makama’s Juju Stories or Adura Onashile’s Girl share that same instinct: to find truth not in plot twists, but in silence.
“For us, Mother is a film about two people who have pushed grief to the point of extremity,” Àdìó reflects. “The act happens offscreen for a reason; it’s not the point. It’s one of the proofs of the point.”
Daniel adds, “Mother isn’t trying to shock or preach. It’s a quiet film that asks you to sit with discomfort and think about empathy and judgment—how quick we are to define right and wrong without understanding the full picture.”
The final scene holds that discomfort. The daughter leaves for work. The father sits on the sofa, staring at the meal she has prepared for the next day. He calls her name softly, twice. The room answers with silence.
We’re left with a question that never resolves: Is he grieving through what he has done, or has it consumed them both?
In the end, Mother doesn’t justify. It observes. And in its quiet observation, it joins the small, brave circle of films that face truth without turning away.