Munachiso Nzeribe is a 19 year old filmmaker and writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. During this pandemic, she spent a lot of time in isolation, which made her look to her immediate surroundings differently. The film is almost entirely filmed from behind a window, it is in this way Nzeribe's view of her own world.

Onyemaechi is a visual juxtaposition of the class divide in Lagos, Nigeria. Through a montage of symbolic videos of Lagos, the narrator takes viewers on a thought provoking journey. The 8mm pela film format used is intended to reflect the thermal and rustic energy Lagos emits and to show that over the years Lagos has more or less remained the same. Lagos has two sides. The developed and the underdeveloped. The spacious and the clustered. The beautiful and the ugly.

The corruption and mass social injustice in Nigeria makes it almost impossible to paint a bright future for the nation. The people living in abject poverty will get poorer and the rich will get richer. Nigeria faces issues like corruption, unchecked violence against women and religious related hate crimes. Many people live in fear and doubt of what tomorrow holds. Hence, who knows tomorrow when tomorrow’s potential has already been stolen?

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‘When I look outside my window, it’s a lot to take in. Lagos is such a big city and more than half of the city is living in poverty. There is always this direct contrast between wealth and poverty when you look around the city. It’s deeply upsetting. With this film, I decided to gather my thoughts on the daily woes of the average Lagosian, and I sort of entered existential dread. I thought to myself, what is the meaning of life when your most prevalent thought is how to get your next meal? It made me realize how we may all have dreams of what our lives should be but not everyone is in an empowering position to make those dreams a reality.’

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