The lingering opening shot of “Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)” is a tangle of cords. Mofe (Jude Akuwudike), a factory technician working in Lagos, Nigeria, is all too familiar with their jumbled, haphazardly arranged mess. Constantly called to tinker with them to keep printers and cutting machines running, he’s learned to snip and tape and twist them to keep electrical malfunctions at bay. Mofe knows the precarity of the situation. But his calls for new junction boxes fall on deaf ears. And so, day in and day out, he must wrestle with these unruly cords to maintain a semblance of order on the factory floor.
It’s hard not to read into this introductory frame the central conceit of what co-directors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri are sketching out with their extraordinary debut feature film. Mofe, like many working class Nigerians we meet in “Eyimofe,” must contort...
It’s hard not to read into this introductory frame the central conceit of what co-directors (and twin brothers) Arie and Chuko Esiri are sketching out with their extraordinary debut feature film. Mofe, like many working class Nigerians we meet in “Eyimofe,” must contort...
- 7/22/2021
- by Manuel Betancourt
- Variety Film + TV
Two only glancingly connected stories of street-level life in Lagos form the ostensible backbone of “This Is My Desire,” the engaging, earnest, loose-limbed debut feature from Nigerian twin-brother directors Arie and Chuko Esiri. But the shape of those lives is vaguely similar. Both characters begin their chapters not just dreaming of escaping the everyday grind of life in their nation’s largest, most populous city, but taking firm, expensive steps toward achieving that goal: buying passports, saving for visas, making dodgy deals for documentation with shady brokers. And still, it is a goal that never seems quite within their grasp, and not just because of the logistics. It’s almost as though Lagos itself intervenes — just as it does in almost every frame of Dp Arseni Khachaturan’s textural, colorful 35mm photography — and conspires with fate to pull them back into an embrace that is by turns comfortingly familiar and callously indifferent.
- 3/1/2020
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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