The Boy Who Gave

A Kano teenager who gives away everything he owns — food, clothes, time, money — and the ripple effects on his family, neighbourhood, and ultimately himself. The Boy Who Gave sounds like a moral fable and opens like one, but director Tope Oshin is too intelligent to let it stay there. By the second act, the film has become an examination of what generosity costs in an economy built on scarcity, and how a community responds when it cannot explain someone who simply gives.

Uzor Arukwe, usually cast as the charming lead or the best friend, disappears into the role of the boy’s father — a man whose dignity is threatened by a son he cannot understand and cannot stop. It is a career-expanding performance of controlled anguish. Sani Muazu brings tremendous gravitas as a neighbourhood elder who becomes the film’s moral compass.

The northern Nigerian setting — shot with an eye for light and colour that turns ordinary streets into something luminous — gives the film a specificity that Nollywood’s Lagos-centric output rarely achieves. The film’s final sequence, which refuses easy resolution, is one of the bravest endings in recent Nigerian cinema.

Verdict: Small in scale, enormous in ambition. The Boy Who Gave is the kind of film that makes you rethink the word generous.