Stolen Waters

After seeing at least two irokotv movie productions we have now begun to notice a trend in these movies which is that they generally start off looking like the most basic, regular storyline and somewhere after the mid-point, and especially towards the end, the story flips and becomes something way more different than we could have ever imagined – sort of like the earlier Pascal Amanfo films (before everyone in his movies started talking to the camera).

Stolen Waters is the story of a girl who is abused by her step-father at a young age and what she grows up to become. The abused girl, is played by Nse Ikpe-Etim and the step-father is Keppy Ekpenyong. Keppy’s character is a politician who is being continuously blackmailed by his step-daughter for the sins of his past. In general it’s a mesh of blackmail, secrets and hidden agendas. Both Nse and Keppy did a great job holding conviction and carrying their characters from start to finish.

The second scene of the movie sees an upset Barbara Soki yelling at her daughter and asking “who got her pregnant”? Asides from the obvious ignorance of the mother, another thing that strikes is the air of artificiality that surrounds Barbara’s performance in this scene. It all seems a little to fake and staged. Initially you might think it is just the first scene and it will improve eventually but that air of ‘fake’ and ‘staged’ doesn’t go away through out the movie, even when it is not inherently obvious in her performance it is still present in shades throughout.

The movie also stars Mary Remmy as the other daughter. This is probably one of those movies that provides an opportunity to see Mary’s actual talent. Regardless of the fact that she was not in the lead role she was still able to possess the screen in her scene and command attention whenever she came on. She had effortlessness that could only come with experience and skill that was undeniable. For the first time, I noticed Mary Remmy and ironically she wasn’t even the protagonist.

The movie is a bit reminiscent of “Distance Between” but only in subject matter, both movies do deal with two different stories on domestic abuse. One thing that they deal with similarly is the after effects of abuse on the victims. Both movies showed both extremes of the possible after effects in the storyline. However, even though domestic abuse was the principal subject matter that was only about 50% of the story’s focus. The writer was still able to take this social issue and wrap it up in the makings of the typical nollywood movie so it did not end up seeming overly preachy. In fact on, the ‘preachiness’ scale Distance Between was probably a more preachy movie.

The movie had a solid believable cast but most of the shortcomings were technical such as the over dramatic score, the poor audio quality, the visual quality and the loss of cohesiveness. The continuity was alright but throughout the movie you notice that it lacked a certain degree of cohesiveness. The scenes seemed more held together in the beginning then towards the end that starts to crumble. Even though the all-round video quality of the movie was probably one of our better works, there was still room for improvement. It lacked that general ‘pristine’ quality that we have started to associate with irokotv productions.

The storyline behind Stolen Waters started off as one thing and ended as another. It’s a good watch but it’s definitely not the best from this production team.