Ime Ego

Logline

Set in South-Eastern Nigeria, Ime Ego tells the story of Mercy’s hopes and dreams to join her groom. He lives in Dubai and the conversations between their two families as they navigate the terms of life to be spent together between Mercy and her prospective husband in their absence.

Synopsis

Mercy, a final year student at the Imo State University, Owerri, is thousands of kilometres away from her fiancé in Dubai, with whom she’s having a wedding in her ancestral village of Orlu, that he will be absent from. The day begins with the purchase of drinks, preparation of food, setting up the tents,  and the arrival of family members on both sides. As she gets ready to meet her in-laws and partake in the ceremonies, the negotiation of her bride price begins in earnest. Mercy’s dream is to travel to start a new life with her husband, and this absentee wedding is a gateway to their fulfilment. In her fiancé’s absence, it is left to his family and hers to work out the terms of her bride price. A process that begins with a list of items that are negotiated back & forth is a tense balance between causing offence and reaching a satisfactory conclusion. The outcome of these negotiations could result in Mercy’s dreams being dashed.

Director

Director's Statement

Migration is a natural human right. It’s as natural as breathing. Historically, the boundaries that have been put in place to prevent movement from the Global South to the North and yet encourage plunder the other way around is inhumane. The opportunity to tell our stories concerning this birthed this project.  It’s been quite the journey to making Ime Ego. In 2018, when I received the call for application for Generation Africa, I was caught up in the viral TLC 90 days Fiance TV show. A Nigerian man called Michael was engaged to an American woman, Angela. On the show, he was quite the receptacle of abuse and degradation, I suppose, for the chance to one day migrate to America. I wondered how these imbalances set the stage for creating a family. A form of irregular migration in this part of Africa is absentee marriage. An absentee marriage is a marriage that has only one of the partners present for the ceremony and the marriage itself afterwards. In most instances, the husband. This marriage is purported to grant financial security and stability, which is the prime determining factor for those who allude to it. Not just for the woman but her family by extension. Listening to stories of couples who, years after their wedding, are still living apart, in the course of making Ime Ego, it was easy, though painful, to see how this has caused most of these families pain and despair. For some, the bride is promised security, stability and extended financial provision for her family. But more often than not, this is not the case. At the same time, I was keen to tell a story of a woman with agency, that chooses to explore this kind of marriage even as the odds are against her. Ime Ego tells the story of many a woman and many a family. It sheds light on how what was once the too-well-known familial and societal pressure on the woman to marry dissolves into the woman accepting that the only way to lift her family out of poverty is to marry. Ime Ego reveals how families are torn when, sometimes, these marriages either take-off and crash or don’t take off at all. Ime Ego is more than a project. It is an important story, one I’m grateful to tell as part of this collection.

Producers