Tooth: A Child’s Injury Exposes the Burden Placed on a Teenage Caregiver

Spoiler notice: This preview covers the published premise and industry-programme selection. It does not reveal the ending.

A young boy tries to undo a superstition connected to a tooth he has lost. He gets hurt. What follows exposes the responsibility placed on another child.

That is the premise of Tooth, the Nigerian fiction short directed by Dika Ofoma. The official programme description identifies the boy as five years old and places a teenage girl in charge of raising him. His mother’s response to the injury brings the unfairness of that arrangement into focus. kurzfilmtage.ch

It is a small domestic incident with a much larger question inside it: how much responsibility can a household place on a teenager before care becomes an unreasonable demand?

The teenager inside the family crisis

The premise places two young people in very different positions. The boy makes a decision shaped by a belief he is trying to understand. The teenage caregiver is expected to carry responsibility for him.

That imbalance is the strongest reason to follow the project. It invites viewers to consider the expectations surrounding care, including whose age is acknowledged and whose need for protection is overlooked.

The mother’s reaction matters because it shifts attention from the accident itself to the household’s response. The published description does not disclose the full confrontation or its resolution. Those details belong to the film.

It would also be premature to decide how the finished work presents each character. A concise premise can establish a conflict without explaining every circumstance around it.

Why Tooth is receiving industry attention

Tooth is one of four projects selected for Final Cut: New African Shorts, a platform organised jointly by Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. The official programme scheduled the presentations for Thursday, 5 November 2026, in Winterthur, Switzerland. kurzfilmtage.ch

The initiative is intended to connect developing African short-film projects with international industry professionals. Its programme provides for one selected project to participate in SFC | Rendez-vous Industry in Cannes. Tooth’s inclusion in the four-project selection does not establish that it has received that further opportunity. kurzfilmtage.ch

What Kept Me Up reports that Nkali Films and Idunoba Entertainment produced the short, and that it was still in post-production when Ofoma discussed it. What Kept Me Up

Where can you watch it?

The cited festival entry is an industry-programme listing, rather than a public streaming release announcement. The sources below do not establish a general Nigerian cinema date or an online viewing link.

For now, Tooth is a project to follow. Its appeal lies in a precise and uncomfortable conflict: a boy needs care while the girl responsible for him may be carrying more than she should.

That is enough to make the film worth watching for further announcements, without inventing the scenes or outcome that will determine how the story is told.

Sources: Winterthur’s official programme | What Kept Me Up’s production report