Critics Campus 2025 participant Monique Nair speaks to Kalu Oji about diaspora, belonging, family and home, as well as the conflict between community and gentrification, as dramatised in his touching father–son tale Pasa Faho.

“These spaces, they’re genuine, but they’re not perfect,’ says Kalu Oji, reflecting on community-minded places like the suburban markets of Melbourne.

They’re sometimes held together by bandages or sticks, but there’s a lot of love in there. And you’ve got different characters. You’ve got the good and the bad and the clunky and the joyful. And it’s unsanitised. I love that. It just feels, for me, how human interaction should feel.

Oji evokes this world in his debut directorial feature, Pasa Faho. It is precisely at a market with this kind of energy that we first meet the protagonist, Azubuike (Okey Bakassi). He is at home in the place of his life’s work, cracking a cheesy yet endearing joke as he successfully sells a pair of shoes. Outside is the hectic buzz of chatter in a plethora of accents and languages – deals being made, regulars catching friends as they walk by. From the film’s opening sequence, we are pulled into the kind of rough yet soft-edged Melbourne marketplace held together by interconnected immigrant communities. It’s all a bit unrefined and stuck in a bygone era, yet it’s rich in earnestness and charm.

Pasa Faho is a tender family comedy-drama keenly attuned to the joys and challenges of growing up and building a life in suburban Melbourne’s African diaspora. Azubuike’s 12-year-old son, Obinna (Tyson Palmer), moves from interstate to reconnect with him as chaos strikes and his shoe shop falls under threat of closure. The father–son dynamic is the pulse of the story and builds on Oji’s shorts, which similarly explore the nuances of parent–child relationships in diasporic contexts. Azubuike and Obinna’s bond is approached with tenderness: in their attempts to connect, in the way their understandings of the world bristle against each other and in what remains unsaid. Azubuike is trying to pass on his Igbo values to his son, who is only beginning to figure out his own moral compass and his place in the world. With an Igbo father and an Anglo-Australian mother, Obinna is, in Oji’s words, “at once an insider and an outsider”.

Early on, Azubuike is taken aback by Obinna’s use of a Western name at school to make things easier, and they clash around the fate of a goat that Obinna wants as a pet but which Azubuike has bought for a welcome meal. While some cultural differences are difficult for Obinna to sit with, he displays an openness when interacting with people. He embraces the companionship of his aunty and the other Igbo kids at the community church, and exhibits a gentle curiosity towards his father, mimicking his sounds and asking to hear stories of his past. The introductory narration aptly frames reconnecting with culture and community as a core part of the process of growth: “For as the boy finds that he has come of age, he must find his way back.”

Pasa Faho

Pasa Faho presents a kind of dual coming of age: both father and son grapple with major shifts in their lives and perspectives. In developing the character of Azubuike, Oji drew on the ambitious people around him. He notes that Azubuike’s identity was “built on pride and this idea of being a provider, example setting, and needing to be constantly strong and holding things in place. I thought of letting that fall apart and letting the relationship and dynamic drive that.” Azubuike persists and stumbles, all the while trying (and failing) to shield his difficulties from his son. As Obinna witnesses his father’s obstacles, he too confronts disillusioning truths about the world and undergoes the altering experience of learning to truly see his father as human, flaws and all.

It’s that kind of poignant time in childhood of seeing a parent, or one of your caregivers, or someone who you’ve understood as providing shelter and safety and stability for you, lose their sense of stability and their sense of self, and kind of undergo this rocky period – which, [for] a child, is very, is very affecting.

Azubuike may be fighting for his livelihood, pride and dreams, but there is also a broader grief and celebration of community that the film holds space for. Pasa Faho is situated within the broader context of gentrification, the economic and social pulls that are breaking down community structures and reshaping the city. “We’re simultaneously in a housing crisis but also, every other week, there’s a new apartment block going up,” says Oji. “They’re designed like these boxes where people aren’t encouraged to interact.” In striking opposition to these individualist apartments, the director speaks with warmth about the markets that inspired the film’s setting. For him, community-based spaces like some of Melbourne’s most iconic markets are

a really beautiful reminder of how I think a beautiful life looks like … and what a joyous community looks like. I see that changing in Melbourne, and I see those communities getting kind of pushed out further and further because we’re in this profit-driven way of living. I wanted to explore that and also archive that because it’ll be an artefact a decade from now.

The pull of nostalgia is sweet and heavy in Pasa Faho. It is a particular kind of nostalgia imbued not only with dreams of what could have been, but also with memories of connectedness in the homeland. “The whole thing is a diaspora story,” muses Oji, “and one of the big questions the film poses is what one carries from back home, and what one compromises or leaves behind.”

Pasa Faho screens in Melbourne on Saturday 16, Wednesday 20 and Sunday 24 August and in regional Victoria on Sunday 17, Friday 22 and Saturday 23 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.