When Fishes Drown
2012 · 15m · Nigeria
Directed by Soji Ogunnaike
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A hardworking young man repeatedly witnesses domestic violence at home and at work but turns a deaf ear to the victims, especially his neighbour, until he learns that the simplest actions can avert cases of domestic violence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like a PSA, which should bore me—but Ogunnaike does something genuinely weird with complicity and soundlessness that makes the safety-message stuff almost disappear into something more troubling and ambiguous.
A formally deliberate piece working in the social-realist tradition, though the title's metaphor (fishes drowning—silence in plain sight) feels slightly underbaked against the film's clearer moral architecture.
The real coup here is the sound design and what Ogunnaike *doesn't* show us—the specific choice to let the protagonist's deafness become the film's texture rather than its lesson carries everything on a 15-minute budget that could've easily gone didactic.