Clarissa

Reimagining Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Mrs. Dalloway in modern-day Lagos, Nigeria, Clarissa tracks a high-society woman over the course of a single day as she prepares for an elaborate birthday celebration. But as the hours unfold, unexpected encounters with long-distant friends and former lovers pull her into the past, fracturing her composure. Simultaneously, a young soldier named Septimus (Fortune Nwafor) wanders the city, haunted by his own memories of the horrors he has endured.

As the perspectives traverse past and present, and social strata,from the bourgeois to those too easily forgotten, a delicate portrait of contemporary Nigeria emerges. Clarissa is a deeply felt and layered meditation on class, memory, and the emotional realities of a changing post-colonial landscape.