The Travails of Àjàdí
2026 · 10m · Nigeria
Directed by Adeoye Adetunji
Genres: animation, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
After surviving a violent storm at sea, a frustrated fisherman confronts a divine voice to demand answers for his life of hardship — only to discover his suffering was preparation for his true purpose.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent mythic storytelling, sure, but the premise—suffering as divine preparation—is basically the Joseph Campbell playbook everyone's been running since the '70s, just animated and set on water instead of in the desert.
Adetunji's film sits confidently in the lineage of West African oral tradition filtered through contemporary animation craft; the formal restraint in pacing the revelation between the fisherman's rage and the voice's answer suggests a director thinking carefully about how myth functions at the 10-minute threshold.
The surreal register works because of one decision: keeping the divine voice ambiguous—never confirming whether it's internal or external—which turns a stock redemption arc into something genuinely disorienting about agency and acceptance.