In Between the Sound of My HummingBird: Surviving Trauma with Only Memory for Comfort

Seun Faleke’s In Between the Sound of My HummingBird is an account of past trauma, drawn up in the non-linear way that time learns to grow around it. Revolving around two people—Ife and her mother—while a smattering of other figures totter in and out of the frame, it develops the impression of a deep love as strong as the ragged wounds of loss. 

Young Ife (Nneoma Wosu, thoroughly credible) and Mature Ife (Marvellous Ojo) exist simultaneously, two daughter cells whose forms have grown more clearly defined as the years divided them—bound to each other by the terror and grief of losing her mother (Oyinlola Areegbe) to her abusive father (Oluwasanmi Taiwo). Ife has been in therapy to get far enough away from the reverberations of the past, but memories both good and bad swirl around her in unstable circles. She, the steady centre (for shock or maturity) of it all, can only hope to not slip away like her mother had to. 

There is a poetic quality to the narrative, encouraged by the soft non-linearity. However, the film also does not shy away from the graphic ugliness of vicious beatings. In fact, scenes quickly—and intensely—become claustrophobic, especially when the camera is substituted for the character in frontal close-ups, cut at 90-degree angles. Though uneven in quality, the film’s technique deserves praise for its richness of affect. What you see is what has been experienced. Peripheral characters, appropriately, do not make a difference when only tyrant and victim exist in a brutal dyad (or at most, a triad).

In Between the Sound of My HummingBird lays out the dynamic between abusive fathers and their victims in sharp detail: horror, numbness, grief, and their ravaging, residual trauma, going round and round in circles, returning in waves, sticking to the skin like dried blood. But the memory of the father is not all consuming. There is also, resolute, the memory of the mother. 

Watch In Between the Sound of My HummingBird Short Film Trailer