CITATION

Citation is a sobering drama about sexual assault on college campuses allegedly based on true events. Kunle Afolayan the director of the movie with casts in the likes of Ini Edo, Temi Otedola, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Gabriel Afolayan, Joke Silva delivers an unflinching wakeup call that extends well beyond Nigeria’s borders by depicting an environment where rape culture has been normalized due to oppressive assumption to gender and sexuality.

The story begins with a phone conversation scene between an undergraduate and her lecturer, who is offering her good grades in exchange for sex: she sets trap for him in which he falls into and the result was a public disgrace, jungle justice and ultimately the lecturer being hit by an oncoming car while escaping angry mob.

The writer and director actually did a very nice work here by showing the advance effect of jungle justice and making viewers see reasons why they should never take law into their own hands. The same incident happens again, but this time between a young Masters student Moremi (Teni Otedola) and her lecturer Prof N’Dyare (Jimmy Jean-Louis), but these time rather than taking the law into her hand, she dragged him before the university senate.

Although the movie in the second side of the story which is between the Masters student and prof. N’Dyare tries to correct the mistake in the case between the undergraduate and her lecturer but Moremi suffers the anxiety of not being believed by the panel when prof. N’Daye, who was more street smart, manages to convince the panel at first that he was the victim of sexual harassment.

This raises my curiosity about the type of system that rules the world, where the innocent if not smart suffers and secondly how many rape victims would have the courage to push to the end in the case of delayed justice.

Nevertheless, in all of these, the movie gives voice and hope to rape victim in our contemporary world where rape victims because of stigmatization are made to keep shut and die in silent.

See trailer here