There is a scene in Debola ‘Santa’ Ogunshina’s upcoming short film, Boys Don’t Sing, in which an old man struggles to pee. Nobody or nothing on screen explains why. The words “prostate cancer” are never spoken.

And yet, when the teaser landed on Instagram and Facebook on the 21st of June 2026 (Father’s Day), the comments filled almost immediately with people who understood. Children recalling fathers they had lost to the disease and strangers passing grief between them like a shared inheritance.

In this interview with Tomilola ‘Coco’ Adeyemo, an award-winning writer and researcher who has authored multiple best-selling novels with screen credits in Nollywood blockbusters, Debola Ogunshina discusses the inspiration behind the film and how he deliberately kept the condition off the page, trusting the image to carry it.

For a filmmaker who lives by the old screenwriting commandment to show, not tell, watching an audience feel its way to the truth on its own is the closest thing to proof that the method works. The gamble paid off for Boys Don’t Sing. “People understood the scene without the mention of prostate cancer,” he says, still a little struck by it.

Debola Ogunshina has produced and directed several plays and films, but Boys Don’t Sing holds a special spot in his heart. Apart from being his latest work, the film was conceived almost four years ago and is inspired by the close-knit, communal community of Idi-Araba, Mushin in Lagos, where he grew up. He had imagined this film as the closing note of his filmmaking journey. Now he isn’t so sure. “I believe it kind of marks a new beginning.”

The film, though yet to be released, has already received praise for the context, the teaser, and the promise it holds. But none of these came quickly. Ogunshina first wrote Boys Don’t Sing in 2022, reached a third draft that his personal community of filmmakers loved, cast it, and then, for a tangle of reasons, never shot it.

When he returned to the script in January 2026, it suddenly looked like it needed serious surgery. So he went to school on the form, studying some fifty to sixty award-winning shorts, until a problem with Boys Don’t Sing snapped into focus: “the men were talking too much.”

“When I read the third draft in 2026, I realised the men were talking too much. I removed most of the lines and looked at ways I’d use images to move the film. Then, I went through various ideas that I thought were very Yoruba. I looked at images that I could remember from my experience living in Idiaraba. I thought of Yoruba adages that I could represent visually,” he says.

To find the right register of solitude, he studied painters of loneliness — Adeife Adeniran, Edward Hopper, Van Gogh — though he insists the most important reference of all was the cultural shorthand he had been collecting since Idiaraba. By the time he was satisfied, he was on the eighth draft before he went ahead to shoot.

The initial title for the film: Death on a Note was a heavy and gloomy one. While he liked the gloom, he did not appreciate the weight of it. He wanted something that haunted rather than announced — a fit for a film he describes as bleak and funny in the same breath, a tone he calls “humour of the mind.”

The breakthrough came, fittingly, in the shower. He was replaying a song by Clipse, “The Birds Don’t Sing They Screech in Pain” — a track he later learned was a tribute to the brothers, who lost both parents within roughly four months of each other. That song, he discovered, traced back to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (Angelou herself borrowed that line from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” which makes Ogunshina the latest in a long line of artists reaching for the same caged bird.)

“Boys Don’t Sing was influenced by the song “The Birds Don’t Sing They Screech in pain” from The Clipse. Coincidentally, it’s a story about how they lost both parents in four months. I was in the bathroom listening to this song that I’ve listened to many times before, and I had my eureka moment there. Boys Don’t Sing captures the performative nature of the “strong” man in choosing silence over sharing his challenges,” he says.

The teaser shared attracted attention because of the Yoruba chant where a character asks his manhood to produce urine. Asked why he thought the chant, rather than a dialogue, has become one of the most arresting moments in the video, he says, “English cannot effectively capture some parts of our language.” He means it as both critique and devotion.

He marvels that people are now surprised to hear a two-year-old understand Yoruba, something that was simply ordinary in his own childhood. He treats its preservation as part of the job description. “As a filmmaker, I owe it to preserve this beautiful language.”

The toilet scene is built from that conviction. He wanted to return his ageing men to boyhood, to the memory of a parent half-carrying a sleepy child to the toilet and hissing, singing, or making sounds of running water impatiently, to coax the urine out. A call, he reasoned, demands a response. That hissing eventually hardens into the chant in the scene, with an echo of Saworoide threaded through it. The logic is pure Yoruba proverb: when we grow old, we become children again.

Ogunshina grew up in Idiaraba, Mushin, in the kind of communal world where, as he puts it, “The old are not allowed to be lonely. Elders had children and other elders to argue and laugh with over the most ridiculous things, and that density of company is the film’s quiet agenda. He remembers a friend’s father who died after leaving bubbly Mushin for a quieter, more distant neighbourhood with no friends or children nearby. “Old people thrive in communities,” he says, and the film reads like an argument against ever forgetting it.

He is just as protective of where he comes from. Say “Idiaraba,” or any ghetto, and the first thought is ‘crime,’ a framing he blames partly on stories told by people who never lived there. His duty, as an insider, is to tell the other stories. “We forget that they (people who live in the places termed ghetto) also fall in love. They also live as humans like every other person.” There will be crime in his work, he allows, but he is done watching it take centre stage.

For all the heaviness in Boys Don’t Sing and his other works, Ogunshina wears his influences lightly and his interests widely. He calls himself eclectic because he is as devoted to combat sports as to cinema and treats genre as a matter of deciding which flavour takes the lead in any given story.

Boys Don’t Sing is heading to the festival circuit, and Ogunshina’s team is courting partners to build screenings around ageing, loneliness and male friendship and everything to put the film in front of the people who need it most. Yet, his measure of success is smaller and far more intimate than any premiere.

“My goal is delivered if someone sees the film, picks up her phone and calls her dad to ask, ‘How are you? I mean, how are you for real?’”

Additional reporting by Tomiwo Ojo

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