The Mark of Ekemmadu

The Story

Synopsis

In 1970s rural Nigeria, a mother flees with her disabled son Chikezie after villagers turn against them. She rebuilds her life as Bianca, a powerful medicine woman running a shrine in Umunta village — where those she heals become forever bound to her son. The debt is simple: return yearly with offerings, or the healing reverses. But as the years pass, the shrine demands more. It demands children. It demands friends for Chikezie.

Decades later, Sampson is a successful lawyer who has spent his life running from his past. As a boy named Naza, he was healed at Bianca's shrine and marked forever. When his first son Obinna turns one, the shrine demands the child be brought. Sampson refuses. That night, his son dies from a snake bite — killed by the very creature Chikezie becomes.

Now Sampson's wife Vivian is pregnant again with another boy. Haunted by visions she doesn't understand and a husband hiding dark secrets, she watches as something ancient circles closer with each passing day. With time running out, Sampson must gather the other marked men and return to Umunta to end the cycle — or watch his family destroyed by a debt that was never his to pay.