Uzoamaka Power is having a year. Call of My Life is still being talked about months into its release, and now she returns to the Zikoko Life anthology format that gave her My Body God’s Temple last year, this time as writer and director of Siraam, the first of three short films in Zikoko Life’s second outing. Siraam follows a young creative, ambitious, emotionally bruised, and stuck in a situationship that is slowly consuming her sense of self. The film stars Genoveva Umeh in the title role, tackles sexual and reproductive health with a directness Nigerian screens rarely permit, and wraps its thesis in a visual aesthetic that is among the most distinctive things Power has put on camera.
This review contains plot details.
Siraam
Directed by: Uzoamaka Power
Written by: Uzoamaka Power
Genre: Drama
Language: English
A Woman Trying to Hold Herself Together
Siraam opens with its protagonist looking into a mirror and saying, “I see you clearly…” It is an arresting image, a woman addressing her own reflection in a moment that feels like it is setting up a recurring motif about identity and self-recognition. The problem is that the mirror does not return. The idea it plants never develops into a thread that runs through the film and transforms by the end. It sits at the opening as an image with potential and nowhere to go, which is a small but telling symptom of the film’s larger difficulty: it reaches for meaning before it has built the structures to hold it.
What the film does establish clearly is the emotional architecture of its protagonist. Siraam is in a situationship with Zubee, a man who gives her exactly enough intimacy to prevent her from leaving but not enough commitment to give her anything to hold on to. He refuses to use protection, and she allows it because the connection feels like too much to lose. When a pregnancy scare arrives and reveals exactly how little Zubee is prepared to take responsibility, and when he later turns up engaged to someone else, Siraam’s emotional life scatters. She begins filling the absence with whoever is available, until the physical consequences of those choices arrive in the form of an STI.
This is a story about what happens when a woman organises her sense of worth around a man who was never going to reciprocate. It is also, more quietly, a story about learning to advocate for yourself, sexually, professionally, and relationally. The closing image of Siraam choosing better, buying her own protection and beginning to take charge of her health rather than outsourcing it to a man’s preferences, is the most honest statement the film makes. Power’s instinct to treat these choices without a moralising lens is the right one.
The female friendship between Siraam and Chidaalu produces the film’s strongest writing. When Chidaalu tells Siraam, “You don’t have to wait for men to hate you before you love yourself,” the film locates its thesis in a single line. Their dynamic, with its quarrels and its loyalty that survives them, is where the screenplay feels most grounded.
Too Many Threads, Too Little Time
A short film’s primary obligation is to know what it is about and to say that one thing well. Siraam has at least four things it wants to say: sexual and reproductive health, the emotional fallout of the undefined relationship, female friendship, and the quiet presence of a man who has been watching Siraam with genuine feeling all along. Each of these is a real theme. Together, in thirty-two minutes, they compete more than they cooperate.
The result is a film that feels choppy where it should feel continuous. Character beats arrive and are resolved before they have had time to settle. The friendship between Siraam and Chidaalu has a fight and a reconciliation that happens quickly enough to feel like a summary rather than an event. Olisa, Chidaalu’s brother, is introduced with restrained, attentive energy that signals feeling without announcing it. His eventual declaration, however, does not land with the weight it could carry because the film has not given him enough room to develop from a presence into a person. The ending suggests that Siraam choosing him is an act of choosing herself better. That is a worthwhile idea. It needed more runway to earn the emotional resonance it reaches for.
The pregnancy scare sequence also has a structural problem. The doctor communicates that Siraam is pregnant, allows a moment of terror to land, and then reverses the information. A medical professional with a patient in that state of vulnerability has a responsibility the film sidesteps by using the moment primarily for dramatic punctuation. It is a small thing that shakes the film’s credibility at an emotionally important juncture.
The middle section, where Siraam processes Zubee’s departure by making a series of poor choices, is where the pacing loses its grip most visibly. Events stack rather than build. The film is moving through its checklist of consequences without the kind of scene-to-scene momentum that makes you feel the downward pull of a character’s choices.
What the Camera and Cast Carry
The visual style of Siraam is its most immediately pleasurable quality. Pop-art colours, expressive production design, a palette that communicates Siraam’s world as vibrant even while her interior life is in disarray. The set design is meticulous in the way Power’s work has consistently been, and the lived-in details of Siraam’s apartment, its cramped warmth, its small domestic textures, do the work of establishing character before dialogue arrives. A woman speaking into a blowing fan, drying her underwear on it, stubbing her toe while walking through her own space, these are the kinds of details that make a character feel inhabited rather than constructed.
Genoveva Umeh is exactly what the film needs at its centre. She brings a quicksilver quality to Siraam that keeps the character from becoming either a victim or a cautionary type. Umeh can be funny about Siraam’s pain because she lets you see the pain first, which means the humour reads as coping rather than deflection. She carries the film’s emotional range without effort and makes even the more schematic moments feel like something a real person might live through.
Shawn Faqua does genuine work with Zubee in limited screen time. The character’s selfishness is specific rather than generic: not cruelty but a comfortable non-commitment that expects no accountability. Natse Jemide’s Olisa communicates longing with restraint, which is the correct choice for a character whose feelings are supposed to be felt before they are stated. Amara Nnanna as Chidaalu has the film’s warmest dynamic with Umeh, their friendship rendered with the natural texture of two people who have been arguing and forgiving each other for years. The pharmacist scenes, played for comedy, earn their laughs without overreaching.
Final Thoughts
Siraam iis the kind of short film that shows a filmmaker’s instincts are sound even when the execution is uneven. Power knows what she is doing with visual language, she knows how to write women with specificity and genuine affection, and she understands that stories about female sexuality belong inside the experience rather than at a cautionary distance from it. Those qualities are real and present throughout the film.
What is also present is the limitation of trying to honour too many ideas in thirty-two minutes. The mirror motif that opens the film and does not return, the crying that recurs without sufficient psychological grounding for an audience encountering Siraam for the first time, the subplot that ends without being fully built, these are not failures of vision. They are failures of editing and directorial discipline, the kind that come from a filmmaker who cares deeply about her subject and has not yet made the harder cuts that a short film format demands. The story knows where it wants to go. The film does not always find the most direct path there.
Verdict
Watch this, particularly if My Body God’s Temple or Call of My Life resonated with you. Genoveva Umeh’s performance and the visual design justify the thirty-two minutes. Come understanding that the film reaches for more than its runtime can fully hold, and that its best moments are real achievements within a format that punishes over ambition.
For a free watch on YouTube, it gives more than it withholds.
