For Angela Okafor, filmmaking is the newest chapter in life shaped by immigration, community leadership, advocacy, and personal experience.
The Nigerian-born attorney, entrepreneur, and former Bangor City Council member has now turned to storytelling with For Your Loss, her debut Nollywood film, which explores child sexual abuse, victim blaming, family silence, and the consequences of failing to have difficult conversations with children.
For Okafor, the film is more than entertainment. It is another form of advocacy.
“Everybody who knows me knows Angela Okafor has been an advocate,” she told Amjambo Africa in an exclusive interview. “So, this is another version of my advocacy.”
Okafor was born and raised in southeastern Nigeria, where she studied law. She moved to the United States with her family in 2008 and settled in the Bangor area. She has since built a career as a lawyer, entrepreneur, community leader, and public policy advocate. She also became the first immigrant and first person of color elected to the Bangor City Council, an experience she said helped open doors for other members of diverse communities.
But some of the issues that have shaped her advocacy are deeply personal.
Okafor revealed that she was sexually abused as a child by someone who was part of her family circle and had access to her home. She said she did not tell her parents at the time. Instead, her behavior began to change.
“I started to act out,” she said, recalling how adults around her interpreted her behavior as stubbornness or defiance. At one point, she said, people even attributed her behavior to spiritual problems.
Looking back, Okafor said those changes were ways she was calling for help. “Pay attention,” she said. “Sometimes children do not know how to scream for help. Sometimes they call out for help through changing behavior.”
That experience helped inform the themes of For Your Loss, which follows the consequences of sexual abuse and the silence surrounding it.
Challenging victim blaming
The film was inspired partly by her own experiences, Okafor said, but also by broader social issues she has witnessed in Nigeria and elsewhere.
One of the central issues she wanted to confront is victim blaming. When allegations of sexual abuse or assault emerge, she said, society too often asks questions about the victim: What was she wearing? Why did she go there? Why didn’t she scream? Why did she wait to speak?
For Okafor, those questions obscure the responsibility of the person accused of causing harm.
The problem becomes even more troubling when the victim is a child, she said. “How do we explain [that] little girls, no matter what they’re wearing, yet they get abused by family members or people that have access to them?” she asked.
She believes that shame and fear are major reasons survivors remain silent. In many families, protecting the family name can become more important than protecting the person who has been harmed.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The biggest thing is that culture of silence,” she said. “Culture of shame.”
Silence does not make abuse disappear, Okafor argues. Instead, it can allow problems to continue and leave survivors carrying the consequences for years.
Raising boys differently
Another central theme of For Your Loss is what Okafor calls positive masculinity.
She wants families to think about how boys are raised and what messages they receive about masculinity, entitlement, and responsibility.
As the film shows, she explained, girls are taught to perform domestic responsibilities and prepare to become “good wives,” while boys may receive less attention when it comes to learning responsibility, accountability, and respect.
Okafor believes that conversations about sexual abuse cannot focus only on protecting girls. Families must also teach boys what healthy relationships, responsibility, and consent look like.
“Healthy masculinity does not fear accountability,” she said.
She hopes the film will encourage parents, particularly parents in African immigrant communities, to have conversations with their children that can sometimes feel uncomfortable.
For immigrant families, she said, cultural differences can make those conversations even more complicated. Issues that may be understood differently in countries of origin can become especially important to discuss after families settle in the United States.
When faith and silence collide
Okafor also spoke about the role of religious leaders and community institutions. She said she has heard accounts of situations in which survivors or women experiencing abuse sought help from religious leaders but received advice that failed to recognize the seriousness of the abuse.
She pointed specifically to the need for greater understanding of issues such as marital rape among immigrant communities.
Religious leaders should help create environments where people can speak openly and safely, Okafor believes, rather than encouraging silence or placing the burden on victims to forgive or simply pray away the problem.
“If someone commits a crime, they committed a crime,” she said.
She emphasized that faith and professional support do not have to be in opposition, but that religious communities should not use spirituality to silence, shame, or manipulate survivors.
A message to parents
Okafor said parents should pay attention when a child’s behavior changes. Withdrawal, sudden defiance, or other unusual behavior can sometimes be a child’s way of communicating that something is wrong, she said.
But she cautioned parents against forcing children to talk before they are ready. Instead, parents should create an environment in which children feel emotionally and psychologically safe enough to speak when they are ready.
“Paying attention is very important,” she said, particularly when children are being cared for by other adults or when people outside the immediate family have access to them.
If a child does disclose abuse, Okafor said the response should begin with believing the child, avoiding judgment, and seeking appropriate professional support.
She also acknowledged that she is not a specialist in child protection and encouraged people to seek help from organizations equipped to support survivors.
Bringing the conversation to Maine
Although For Your Loss is set within an African cultural context, Okafor believes its message extends far beyond Nigeria or Africa.
She hopes the film can become a starting point for community conversations in Maine, including among African immigrant families. She envisions screenings followed by discussions involving parents, young people, advocates, educators, health professionals, legal professionals, faith leaders, and community organizations.
Her goal is not simply to have people watch the film. She wants them to talk. “If because of this movie I had this conversation with my child,” she said, describing what success would look like. Or, she added, if someone watched the film and found the courage to overcome shame and tell their story, that would be meaningful.
For Okafor, the ultimate measure of success would be the changes that happen after the credits roll. She hopes parents become more intentional about talking with their children, that communities become more responsive to survivors, and that young people learn different ways of understanding relationships and responsibility.
“It is time to fly”
Okafor’s message to survivors is deeply personal.
She wants those who have never told anyone about their abuse to know that what happened to them was not their fault.
“I see them,” she said.
She told survivors that their experiences did not diminish their worth or beauty, and urged them not to remain imprisoned by shame. “It is time to let go,” she said. “It is time to fly. It is time to turn our pain into power.”
She also called on the broader community to recognize that preventing abuse is everyone’s responsibility. A child does not have to be one’s own for that responsibility to matter, she said. It could be a neighbor’s child, a relative’s child, or a child in the wider community. “We all need to support efforts to fight” sexual violence, she said, urging people at a minimum not to shame or blame victims.
For Okafor, For Your Loss represents the beginning of something larger. She described filmmaking as a new venture and said she hopes to produce more stories inspired by life experiences. The goal is not simply to make movies. It is to use stories to open conversations that families and communities have avoided for too long.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the early August 2026 print edition of Amjambo Africa.
