Showing On 23, 25, 26 February
Monday 6:00pm, Wednesday 4:00pm and 6:30pm, Thursday 6:00pm
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Storyline (warning: spoilers)
Melbourne, 2012, and Azubuike is content to live a simple life selling shoes in a 1970s-style shopfront inside a larger, Southwest-Melbourne market complex. His Igbo community (referring to Nigerians and the language they speak) gather every Sunday at church, and he is otherwise occupied every day by running the shoe store. But interest in modest footwear is waning, and with neighbouring stores going under, it’s clear Azubuike won’t be able to ignore the possibility of foreclosure.
While deciding how best to navigate his depressing economic reality, Azubuike has a more urgent matter to attend to: the arrival of his estranged son. Obinna (now going by ‘Oscar’ at school), the product of Azubuike’s marriage to a white Australian woman, is ten years old and looking for guidance. Now, both father and son must confront the meaning of their relationship as they both just try to get by.
The cultural clash between Igbo and Australian is catalysed in the film as an ongoing disagreement between Azubuike and Obinna over whether a goat is a pet or a feast. The goat is cute and fluffy, but it is also fat, grass-fed and placid. You can guess how well that gesture goes down between them. Feeling a fractured sense of identity already, Obinna is now witnessing first-hand the parts of his paternal culture that make him so different from the predominantly white Australian culture. But Azubuike, facing the loss of his single source of income and livelihood, and not being particularly fond of the church, is simply searching for something concrete to hold onto: a ritual, a ceremony, a tradition he can pass on to his son with pride. ‘I don’t want my son to inherit my failure,’ he says in a tearful, vulnerable moment.