TIFF 2026 ROUNDUP: SECRETS, VISIONS, AND WOMEN WHO REFUSE TO BEHAVE

At first glance, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives and Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars don’t have much in common. One is a messy, funny family drama about a polygamous household full of secrets. The other is a quiet coming-of-age story about a teenage girl, strange visions, and a village that doesn’t quite know what to make of her.

But both are about women trying to survive communities that have already decided who they’re supposed to be and what happens when they stop playing along. Here’s how each film turns that idea into two very different stories.

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

Baba Segi is a wealthy, proudly traditional Nigerian patriarch with three wives, seven children, and the unshakable confidence of a man who believes all of this is evidence that he’s doing life correctly. Then he marries Bolanle, his fourth and youngest wife. She's university-educated, somewhat naïve about the household she’s entering, and immediately treated like a suspicious package by wives one through three. Things get worse when Bolanle doesn’t get pregnant. Baba Segi, convinced the problem must be hers, starts looking for answers, while unwittingly threatening to expose the secrets keeping his entire family together.

What follows is the kind of family drama where nearly everyone’s lying, several people have excellent reasons for lying, and the person most convinced he’s in charge has absolutely no idea what’s happening under his own roof. And The Secret Lives is super funny about Baba Segi’s obliviousness without turning the women around him into punchlines.

The deeper the film digs into how each wife ended up here, the harder it becomes to sort them neatly into victim, villain, or jealous co-wife. These women can be cruel to one another—sometimes spectacularly so—but their cruelty has grown inside a system that teaches them there’s only so much security to go around. And that undercurrent prevents the movie’s constant swing between comedy and heartbreak from feeling less like tonal whiplash. It's just what life is like in this house. It’s juicy, loud, occasionally painful, and enormously satisfying once all those carefully maintained secrets start crashing into each other.

Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars

In the Ennedi desert of Chad, teenage Kellou already knows what it means to be considered different. Her mother died giving birth to her, people in her village treat her family as outsiders, and lately she’s been having visions she can’t explain. Then she meets Aya, an older woman who’s also been pushed to the edges of the community and who seems to understand Kellou’s strange connection to things other people can’t see. Their growing bond gives Kellou something she’s been missing: not just answers, but the possibility that being different might not be something she needs to apologize for.

Unfortunately, the village has already decided Aya is dangerous, particularly as deaths and disasters leave everyone looking for someone convenient to blame.

Soumsoum is less interested in rushing toward answers than sitting inside Kellou’s uncertainty, which is both its appeal and, eventually, its problem. There’s something lovely about the movie’s belief in women finding each other when the communities around them have decided they’re strange, difficult, cursed, or simply inconvenient. Kellou and Aya’s relationship gives the story its emotional pull, especially as mythology, memory, womanhood, religion, and old traditions begin bleeding into one another.

But this is a patient movie, and “patient” occasionally starts feeling like a very generous synonym for “girl, move.” The visions promise a mystery that never develops quite as urgently as you expect, while several strands of village conflict drift in and out without fully tightening around Kellou. Still, there are moments when its dreamy logic clicks and Soumsoum feels less like a story being explained to you than an old tale someone’s passing down. I just wish it cast that spell more consistently.