On Monday, September 9, 2019, Yemi Alade released her first co-produced short film, ‘Home’.
The 13-minute long short film features some popular actors in Nollywood including Frankincense Eche-Ben, and Clarion Chukwurah.
Shot and written by Clarence Peters, ‘Home’ touched on three different topics that borders majorly on emotion, love, and rape.
Yemi Alade plays the lead female role in the short film while Frankincense Eche-Ben played her love interest.
Here are three things we learned from Yemi Alade’s short film.
Fighting for love against all odds
Nneka, played by Yemi Alade, is a young lady, who has fallen head over heels in love with Austine, Frankincense Eche-Ben. Mama Aba is Nneka’s grandmother, played by Clarion Chukwurah, who is against her relationship with Austine. Nneka makes use of every available opportunity to be with Austine despite insults and retribution from Mama Aba. For the better part of the short film, Mama Aba’s warnings fell on deaf ears as Nneka continued seeking the love of her life and spend as little time as possible to make her happy.
Love supercedes all
After several days of insults and retributions from Mama Aba, Nneka plans to elope with Austine. Austine has prepared a perfect escape plan to elope with Nneka in the early hours of the morning before the village wakes up. He’s eagerly waiting for Nneka but the hasty driver wasn’t willing to wait anymore and he leaves without Nneka arriving. Meanwhile, Nneka, back at home is trying to sneak out of the house while Mama Aba is sleeping in the living room. She had been locked out of the room for coming back late after spending so much time with Austine planning their escape the previous day.
Mama Ada woke up and tries to stop Nneka, who was determined to leave at any cost. During a heated argument, Mama Ada slapped Nneka, who was shocked. This got Nneka angry and she started talking back at Mama Ada who tried to slap her again but was stopped by Nneka. She stormed out of the house in anger to run away with her lover, Austine.
Mama Ada was jolted by the realisation that her granddaughter has not only come of age but had dumped her to elope with her lover leaving her all alone in her old age.
Rape is real
A message about the ills of rape was subtly raised in the short film. During the final altercation between Nnenka and her grandmother, she revisited a past scenario of how her mother was raped by Mama Ada's husband and how she was born. The revelation came out after Mama Ada referred to her daughter, Nneka’s mum, as a prostitute and Nneka rose to her defense saying her grandmother was equally culpable in the whole story as she witnessed her daughter being raped without making an effort to save her.
The short film also has an input of Yemi Alade’s music video for one of the songs on her album entitled ‘Home’.