Two only glancingly connected stories of street-level life in Lagos form the ostensible backbone of “This Is My Desire,” the engaging, earnest, loose-limbed debut feature from Nigerian …
. But the shape of those lives is vaguely similar. Both characters begin their chapters not just dreaming of escaping the everyday grind of life in their nation’s largest, most populous city, but taking firm, expensive steps toward achieving that goal: buying passports, saving for visas, making dodgy deals for documentation with shady brokers. And still, it is a goal that never seems quite within their grasp, and not just because of the logistics.
Mofe wants to go to Spain. So much so that on the passport he has just received, he has registered his name as “Sanchez,” which amuses his co-workers at the rundown workshop in which he works as a repairman, endlessly quick-fixing broken-down machines and rewiring busted fuses. By night he fixes things too at a little stall piled high with cheap electronics, or around the house he shares with his sister and her children. Then a tragedy occurs, and he is suddenly beset with new worries.
But even that business takes a backseat to Rosa’s everyday struggles, pleasures and compromises, represented by her romantic options: pushy but not unkind older landlord Mr Vincent who carries a mile-high torch for her; and slick American expat Peter who gives her a taste of the high life but, egged on by friends in his more affluent Lagosian social circle, begins to suspect she’s only with him for money.
Nigeria is home to a thriving film industry which puts out around a thousand films a year and in terms of production solely, outstrips Hollywood by some margin. But relatively few of those more commercially minded movies, which are often shot in matter of days on very low budgets, tend to travel far out of Africa, or to get a great deal of international arthouse attention .
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