Director Lyndsey Efejuku says there were moments in ‘Remi and Nneoma’ where she chose to show grief in ways audiences might not expect.
There are no breakdowns or swelling devastation. Just a kind of absence.
While working on the Nigerian retelling of the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi, Efejuku encountered a scene where Nneoma, portrayed by Liz Benson, returns home after a devastating loss. In the script, she cries. It’s a familiar image, but Efejuku didn’t believe it. The scale of the loss, she felt, made conventional expression insufficient.
“I didn’t want that,” she says. “I wanted her to be lost. Almost vacant, like she’s not there.”
Instead of tears, the character withdraws. She sits among grieving family members, but emotionally, she is elsewhere, unreachable and suspended in a moment too overwhelming to process.
“What has happened to her is so profound,” she explains. “It’s beyond just crying… I couldn’t imagine her crying about this.”
That decision sits at the core of how Efejuku constructed ‘Remi and Nneoma’. The story moves through joy, grief, and back again without settling on a single emotional tone.
“It started out happy, then there was grief,” she says. “Then slowly, joy started walking its way back in… and then there’s grief again. It’s a rollercoaster.”
But these shifts are not driven by plot alone. They hinge on fleeting, human moments that can interrupt even the heaviest emotions.
“You’re laughing, you know, because for a moment you’ve forgotten,” she says. “And then something reminds you… and the sadness is back.”
It’s in these pivots — laughter cutting through mourning, only to collapse back into it — that Efejuku finds the emotional rhythm of the film. The challenge, she adds, is in getting actors to carry those transitions convincingly.
“Filmmaking is about being able to make it believable that they’ve gone from this emotion to this,” she says. “The actor has to carry the audience.”
That emphasis on performance underpins her approach. Every frame, she says, must hold emotional truth. If a character is afraid, the audience should feel it. If they are grieving, that grief must register, even when it isn’t expressed in obvious ways.
At its core, the film returns to a simple idea: loss is inevitable.
“One thing we can be sure of in life is loss,” Efejuku says. “At any point, you’re going to lose someone… or know someone who has.”
Instead of attempting to resolve that reality neatly, the film leans into the confusion or the feeling of not knowing how to respond that follows. Efejuku says even that uncertainty is part of the experience she wanted to capture.
“It’s okay to grieve. It’s okay to feel lost,” she says.
The result of how Efejuku chose to portray grief in ‘Remi and Nneoma’ opens in cinemas on June 26, 2026.
The film stars Liz Benson, Bisola Aiyeola, Ifeanyi Kalu, Uche Montana, Eucharia Anunobi, Tina Mba, Bikiya Graham-Douglas, Kunle Coker, Martha Ehinome, Kelechi Udegbe, Bucci Franklin, Charles Born, Patrick Dante, Soibifaa Dokubo, and Ovunda Ihunwo. It is written by Adelarin Awotedu and Priye Diri and produced by Five2 Media and Beeta Productions.
