CLARISSA Special Screenings

With a star-studded ensemble cast, Arie and Chuko Esiri (EYIMOFE, AFI FEST 2020) relocate Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” to contemporary Lagos, turning its meditation on memory, desire, class and privilege into a distinctly Nigerian story. At the film’s center is Clarissa (a mesmerizing Sophie Okonedo), an elegant society woman preparing for a party where she will reunite with old friends and acquaintances. Beneath the polished preparations, however, the long-buried consequences of past decisions – and the circumstances that informed them — begin to resurface. Moving fluidly between Clarissa’s present and her past as a young woman living at her family’s estate in Abraka, the Esiris craft two distinct characters — the carefree Clarissa of three decades ago (India Amarteifio) who embarks on a secret romance with aspiring poet Peter (Toheeb Jimoh) and simultaneously finds herself drawn to her charismatic and nonconformist friend Sally (Ayo Edebiri), and the muted Clarissa of the present, whose composed exterior masks deep dissatisfaction and regret. As Peter (David Oyelowo) and Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird) now return to her orbit, Clarissa is forced to reckon with her choices and revisit a past long pushed to the edges of her consciousness. In tandem, the film’s elegant surfaces — its calm interiors and carefully maintained rituals — are set against a city marked by profound socio-economic divisions and the lingering effects of colonialism. A parallel thread involving a troubled former soldier (Fortune Nwafor) expands the story beyond Clarissa’s private world, opening a deeper exploration of Nigeria’s collective trauma and national experience, throwing into relief its deep divides. Okonedo’s remarkable performance makes the tension palpable, creating a portrait of a woman haunted less by a single mistake than by the accumulated weight of compromise, with Jonathan Bloom’s 35mm cinematography giving the film a tactile, reflective beauty, and Kelsey Lu’s score reinforcing its dreamlike movement between past and present. The result is an exceptional act of cultural translation, a quietly searching film about the persistence of memory and the individual and collective decisions that haunt us. –Abbie Algar