An unspoken rule governs the eldest child’s existence in many Nigerian households: your life is not entirely your own.
The sad fact is that the terms have already been set before you have the language to negotiate them. You will work. You will sacrifice. You will subtract yourself from the equation so that the people you love can remain in it. Researchers call this arrangement “Black Tax”; the financial and emotional burden that falls disproportionately on those who have, however modestly, managed to get ahead of the family’s immediate circumstance cum crisis.
But in the homes where it operates, it rarely has a name. Naming it would require admitting it is a burden, and admitting it is a burden would feel like a betrayal of the people you are sacrificing yourself for. This is the terrain that Allison Precious Emmanuel’s debut feature, The Boy Who Gave, sets out to dramatise. The film understands the weight intimately. It is considerably less certain about where that weight comes from.
Emmanuel, who wears many hats as writer, director, producer, and lead actor, plays Idah, better known as Broda, an older brother who surrenders his own future incrementally to secure his younger siblings’ survival after their parents’ death. The film premiered at AFRIFF last November to audience acclaim, earning nominations for Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Feature Film, and it arrived in cinemas carrying the emotional reputation of a certified tearjerker. That reputation is earned. The Boy Who Gave will make you cry. The more demanding question is what it wants you to understand once you stop.
The film’s central structural problem is that it mistakes accumulation for argument. Scene after scene, Broda suffers, exerts himself, is cheated, loses something, recovers minimally, and suffers again. Every supporting character exists primarily to advance or complicate his martyrdom: his siblings as emotional stakes, his uncle as obstacle, his romantic partner as temporary reprieve.
The script stages these figures with competence but not interiority. What it cannot do, or will not do, is connect Broda’s individual suffering to the systemic conditions producing it. The Nigerian economy does not appear as an indictment. The political failures that manufacture poverty at scale are largely absent. What remains is a portrait of a good man in hard circumstances which is moving, yes, but also, in its political silence, inadvertently conservative.
When a film about poverty focuses entirely on personal endurance rather than structural cause, it is, whether it intends to or not, suggesting that endurance is the appropriate response. That is a significant choice, and The Boy Who Gave does not seem aware that it has made it.
What partially redeems the film is Emmanuel’s direction and his performance. As a filmmaker, he demonstrates a spatial intelligence that exceeds the screenplay beneath it; blocking scenes through windows and doorways, using light with deliberate emotional grammar, building the texture of Bonny Island into something that feels inhabited rather than staged.
As a performer, he carries Broda’s exhaustion without tipping into self-pity, finding the specific register of a man whose face has learned to absorb bad news as routine. Tina Mba, in limited screen time as the grandmother, and Blossom Chukwujekwu as the father, bring the grounded authority of experienced performers who understand what understatement costs and what it earns. The younger cast members are less consistently served by a script that has not fully imagined them as people independent of their utility to Broda’s arc.
The wearing of so many creative hats (a legitimate feat for a debut) also produces the film’s most visible seam. There is a tension between Emmanuel, the director, who wants to make something formally ambitious, and Emmanuel the subject, who wants to be fully seen. That tension is never quite resolved, and the film’s bloated runtime reflects it: a story that would benefit from a ruthless external edit, that mistakes length for emotional weight and repetition for depth.
The Boy Who Gave is a film made with genuine feeling and real directorial instinct, and Emmanuel is a talent worth watching as he develops. But feeling is not the same as understanding, and the film’s most significant failure is political rather than formal. Broda gives everything. The film never asks who built a world that requires him to.
***Joseph Jonathan is a Film & Culture Critic. Catch him on X @chukwu2big
