B For Boy
Starring: Uche Nwadili, Nonso Odogwu
Director: Chika Anadu
Rating: 3.5/5
Chika Anadu makes her feature film debut with B For Boy, a movie that looks at the gender divide in contemporary Nigeria.
The movie follows Amaka Okoli, a forty-year-old wife and mother to her seven-year-old daughter. On the verge of turning forty, she is pregnant with her second child: but she refuses to have a scan to find out the sex of the child.
In Nigerian Igbo culture, should a woman fail to give birth to a son, the husband is bound by duty to take a second wife in a bid to make sure that the family name lives on.
Amaka suffers a miscarriage and permanent damage to her womb and so she will never give birth to the son that is expected of her. Therefore, she sets out on a desperate path to adopt a baby boy behind her husbands back, while keeping up the pretence that she is still pregnant.
B For Boy is an interesting look into a culture that many of us may not know too much about. Anadu doesn’t make any comment on whether this tradition is right or wrong; she just paints a picture of a relationship that is put under a huge amount of pressure.
Uche Nwadili delivers a fantastic performance in the central role of Amaka: hard to believe that this is her first movie part. Amaka is a modern day woman who sees her world turned upside down when her mother in law starts to push the idea of a second wife on to her son.
It is a charismatic, powerful and emotional performance from Nwadili, as you really feel the pain and desperation that this woman goes through as she tries to find a solution to her problem.
Nonso Odogwu is also terrific as Amaka’s husband: a man who is not as set in his traditional ways as his mother. However, when his younger brother is killed he has to think about the survival of his family name.
B For Boy is a very confident and intelligent directorial debut by Anadu, as she delivers a straightforward and uncomplicated story. This film really delves into the pressures that women are put under in this culture to have a son, and also how baby girls are not as highly valued.
However at a nearly two hour run time the message and story that Anadu is trying to convey does, at times, feel a little laboured. You could easily have shaved off twenty minutes to make the end have more impact and feel less drawn out.
B For Boy is screened at the BFI London Film Festival on 13th and 16th October.
Tagged in BFI