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Brittle Paper readers would remember Wana Udobang from her story “Shrink” [read HERE] that later morphed into a short film with the same title [watch HERE].

She’s been a busy bee ever since then and recently put out the first of a short-film series exploring trauma.

Room 313 is a “series of vignettes” built around the idea of the “talking cure.” In each episode, a character is filmed exploring a painful event in their past while sitting on a therapist’s couch.

The first episode is about a man named Dilim—acted by Harry Dorgu. Dilim has trouble coming to terms with his failed marriage. He can’t seem to understand why his wife left him, so he’s come to the therapist to attempt to think through his experience of abandonment.

This kind of inward movement or subjective exploration of experience is something that we—Africans—typically don’t engage in storytelling, which is why I am loving what Udobang is doing here.

Udobang beautifully captures the objective of the project when she writes:

“I have always thought that as a people, as expressive as we seem to be, we are still very closed. It seems like there is something entrenched inside of us that says we must always be strong. So for sometime now, I had been pondering, if we got a chance to speak about our trauma, or the things we are trying to cope with, what would we say? For me that was the very beginning of how this project came to be.”

Kudos to Udobang for taking on such a project.

Anyway, check it out let me know what you think.

Starring: Harry Dorgu

Written and Directed by: Wana Udobang

Executive Producer: Imoh ‘Majorboy’ Umoren