Goose

Uzoma likes to play games. But games have consequences.

A man and a woman in Lagos want to escape their everyday lives, but extricating themselves is no easy task. Two stories narrated with tenderness and restraint that only fleetingly touch, the dream of migrating to Europe floating above them all the while.

'Where were you when I needed you? What do you want now?' says the sister to her brother. A tiny village, the cars only stop here to take the young women to the city. 'You were there yourself,' she says. 'That's exactly the point,' he replies. 'Don't go.'

Across a single day in Lagos, Nigeria, Clarissa prepares to host a high society party at her home, as her complicated past begins to consume her, in the form of now-distant friends and loves from her youth. Simultaneously, Septimus, a young soldier, is haunted by his own memories of the horrors he has witnessed and endured. As the perspectives traverse past and present, across the bourgeois class and those too easily forgotten by society, a delicate portrait of contemporary Nigeria emerges.

Getting dressed for a night out in Lagos is serious business. The Nigerian megatropolis is home to one of Africa’s most vibrant party scenes, one where the best dressed peacocks in town strut their stuff to the wildly popular sound of afrobeats. “Borderline sleazy, sweaty necks, and chests, chilling outdoors on a cool Lagos night . . . I mean, it just had to be the starting point!” says Maki Oh designer Amaka Osakwe of the bombastic style that inspired her first foray into menswear. “The name of the collection kind of says it all: Because Men in Silk Shirts on Lagos Nights.”