An animated short film by Daniel Alaka
Nigeria
THE FILM
What if the person you loved most was the person you never really knew?
When a nameless narrator is asked whether he believes in love, his answer takes him back through the relationships that have shaped him. Each memory holds a different fragment of affection, longing, and illusion. But one person remains at the centre of it all: Sarah.
Over the course of a year, his feelings for her grow into something consuming. As he revisits those memories, the line between love and obsession begins to blur. What remains is a story shaped as much by what happened as by what he remembers, imagines, and wishes had been different.
Blending poetic narration with evocative animation, About Sarah explores the ways memory reshapes affection — and how easily we can mistake longing for connection.
It is a story about Sarah, but also about the person the narrator becomes in remembering her.
THE LOVE WE REMEMBER
Sometimes, what stays with us isn't a relationship itself, but the version of it we have carried in our minds.
A moment becomes more meaningful with time. A possibility becomes a memory of what might have been. And someone we barely knew can occupy a space in our lives far larger than the time we actually shared with them.
About Sarah sits in that complicated space between admiration and obsession, asking what happens when our feelings become more vivid than the relationship itself.
Through its intimate, animated storytelling, the film considers how we build stories around the people we desire, how memory rearranges the past, and how difficult it can be to separate what was real from what we hoped would be.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Before it became a film, About Sarah was a spoken-word poem.
Daniel Alaka wrote it during his final year at Covenant University, where he performed it at the university's Writers' Conference under the theme Emotions. At the time, he was trying to put words to unrequited infatuation that difficult-to-name space between admiration and obsession, where love can feel more imagined than real.
Years later, that poem found another life as a film.
For Daniel, the transition from poem to animation offered a way to explore the nature of memory itself. Rather than making the story overly elaborate, he wanted the simplicity of the animation to reflect how memories actually work: messy, nonlinear, and sometimes painfully sincere.
The film became a labour of love, though not always an easy one. Daniel remembers considering abandoning the project and moving on to something else. Now that it has found an audience, he hopes people connect with it in their own ways.
What began as an attempt to understand a feeling has become an invitation for others to reflect on their own experiences of love, longing, and remembrance.
FROM THE FILMMAKERS
Daniel's work is interested in the things we may not always stop to examine the emotions we struggle to name, the stories we tell ourselves, and the experiences that shape how we see other people.
With About Sarah, he hopes viewers recognise something of themselves in the narrator. Not necessarily the same story, but the familiar experience of remembering someone and wondering what that memory means.
His hope is simple: that audiences leave thinking about someone they might have loved, and that they come to love Sarah, too.
THE TEAM
Director: Daniel Alaka
Writer: Daniel Alaka
Producer: Daniel Alaka
WHAT DO WE REALLY REMEMBER?
When you think about someone you once loved, are you remembering who they were — or who they became in your memory?
About Sarah invites us to sit with that question, and with the complicated space between affection, imagination, and the stories we tell ourselves about love.
SEE IT AT MMM VOL. 5
ABOUT SARAH, screens as part of Mini Movie Marathon Vol. 5.
14 November 2026 · Nairobi
Come watch. Sit with it. Talk about it.
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