On Our Skin

**17 min**
**Nigeria**
**English & Igbo**
**Written by:** Somto Ihezue & Innocent Chizaram Ilo
**Directed by:** Abiodun Udom & Adejo “Story Priest” Emmanuel
**Produced by:** Emmy Williams, Somto Ihezue, Bella Nadia Bemigho & Oreoluwa Obadofin

THE FILM

What happens when you start taking stories away from people?

In a world where knowledge is tightly controlled, books exploring feminism, gender identity, human rights, race and other vital social issues are banned and burned. In schools, a government taskforce enforces the rules, punishing teachers and students who dare to question the status quo.

For Nduka, a quiet student, that world becomes personal when he wakes up to find a mysterious message etched into his skin in his native dialect:

“The resistance will no longer be written in books. It will be written on our skin.”

He knows he has to hide it. The last student this happened to disappeared without a trace. But when Nduka discovers that another student, Anyi, carries a similar message, the secret begins to spread. Then another student comes forward.And another.

What begins as a strange and isolated phenomenon becomes a growing act of defiance, as students across the school reveal words inscribed on their skin — messages of resistance, identity and truth. The stories may have been removed from the books. But they haven't disappeared.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

On Our Skin began with a simple question:

What happens when you start taking stories away from people?

From that question, Somto's story grew into something much bigger — a film about censorship, identity, fear, love and resistance.

The filmmakers knew quite early that they didn't want to make a film that simply told people what to think. They wanted to create a world, place the audience inside it, and allow them to decide what they felt about what was happening around them.

Getting that world onto the screen, however, came with its own challenges.

The project received a major push after winning the EbonyLife Creative Academy Short Film Grant. The team also received support from partners including Android Press and Sony, while a Kickstarter campaign helped raise additional funds for the production.

But even with that support, making the film wasn't straightforward.

During principal photography, the team realised that some scenes weren't communicating the story world as clearly as they wanted them to. So they made the difficult decision to bring people back and reshoot.

It's the kind of decision that can be difficult to make after a production has already moved on. But looking back, the filmmakers are glad they did.

And then there was the crew.

Everyone brought something to the table. People cared about the little things, challenged ideas and worked through problems together. For the filmmakers, one of the most rewarding parts was watching something that had started as words on a page slowly become an actual world, with actual people living inside it.

There were stressful days. There were things that didn't go according to plan. There were moments when the team wasn't quite sure how they would pull certain things off.

But there were also those moments on set when everything in front of the camera came together and you knew:

This is it.

Those are the moments that stay with you.

WHEN STORIES REFUSE TO BE SILENCED

*On Our Skin* is a Nigerian short film about **censorship, identity and self-expression**, told largely through the experiences of young people.
But the film isn't interested in handing its audience a simple answer.
Instead, it places us inside a world where people are told what they can read, what they can learn and, ultimately, what they are allowed to say.
The supernatural element gives the film a striking way to explore something very real: **what happens when people are denied the freedom to tell their own stories?**
For the filmmakers, the film is less about telling audiences what to think and more about creating the space for them to feel something — discomfort, recognition, anger, hope, or perhaps a quiet sense of possibility.

FROM THE FILMMAKERS

The team behind On Our Skin doesn't expect everyone to walk away feeling the same thing.

They want audiences to feel something. Maybe it's discomfort. Maybe recognition. Maybe anger. Maybe hope.Or perhaps it's simply the quiet feeling that change is possible.
More than anything, they hope the film leaves people thinking about the things we choose to silence — and the parts of ourselves that refuse to stay silent. The film was made in Nigeria, but its journey has taken it much further than the filmmakers initially imagined.
And now, it arrives in Nairobi. For the team, there is something special about sharing the film with an audience that had nothing to do with making it — an entirely new group of people getting to encounter this world, these characters and these questions for themselves.