Ekun Omi, also known as Tears of Desert Water, will debut in the United States at the 16th Silicon Valley African Film Festival. The event runs from October 9 to 12, 2025, in San Jose, California. This screening marks the next step for a film that began as a painting and grew into a powerful Yoruba diaspora film.
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For sixteen years, the Silicon Valley African Film Festival has linked communities, cultures, and continents. Its theme this year, “Africa through the African lens,” invites audiences to see Africa beyond headlines. The festival therefore offers diaspora viewers a chance to reconnect with cultural memory. At the same time, it gives global audiences a window onto the richness of African life.
The Story at the Heart of the Film
Agboogun, the film’s main character, stands between two worlds. He wrestles with heartbreak, fractured identity, and the question of home. Guided by apparitions, he must confront memory, love, and sacrifice. The narrative is not a simple drama; it is ritual, chant, and incantation. Its images draw from Yoruba cosmology, its rhythm follows drum beats, and its movement mirrors traditional dance.
Femi Bajulaye first expressed the idea in a 2018 painting titled Èkún Omi: The Fatigue of Black Anatomy. He later turned the concept into a book in 2020, adding research on migration and cultural loss. Today the story lives in motion, allowing viewers to feel its themes through sight and sound. The film thus completes a decade‑long artistic inquiry into Yoruba culture, migration, and the search for home.
Personal Roots and Collaborative Vision
Femi left Nigeria for the United Kingdom at age ten. His personal journey fuels the film’s return to language, symbols, and practices of his roots. Emmanuel Oluwaseyi Bajulaye, his brother and collaborator, brings performance training from top UK institutions. Together they create a work that feels intimate yet speaks to a universal audience.
Many discussions of migration focus on numbers and policy. Ekun Omi rejects that abstraction. It brings migration back to memory, spirit, and flesh. The film asks viewers to feel the inner worlds of those who move, grieve, and dream of belonging. By doing so, it humanizes the migration experience and shifts the conversation toward empathy.
The Silicon Valley African Film Festival sits in a liminal space that mirrors the lives of many in the diaspora. Here, films like this Yoruba diaspora film remind us that displacement is not only political but also emotional and spiritual. The October screening will therefore serve as a return to memory, to ancestry, and to identity. For diaspora viewers, it affirms what endures. For all other audiences, it offers an invitation to hear Africa’s story told by its own voices.
