A friend casually mentioning the harassment massage therapists face led Godwin Harrison to start working on the script of Happy Ending in 2020. The movie set out to tell a story of how power dynamics and sexualization, despite professionalism, lead to harassment for massage therapists. But Happy Ending does more than that; it touches on another often avoided subject: male rape. “I wanted to tell a story mostly on the ills massage therapists face,” Harrison says. “They go for a session, and the next thing, the client already has this mentality that they have to give him or her a happy ending. That was the initial concept. But when I started writing the script in 2021, [it] took me on a journey which led me to male rape.” A 28-year-old filmmaker, who is based in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, Harrison sees films as advocacy. “While I was still in the [regular] film industry, I noticed that there were certain stories that most producers didn’t want to take up because they believed it would not yield profits,” he says. “I tried to pitch my idea to people about stories we’ve never heard, like LGBTQ stories, that are not common on-screen, but I received several rejections.” But rejection didn’t stop Harrison. In 2019, he gathered his team and founded Hug Media Concepts to tell stories that are not visible to society. Since then, they have released five films exploring various topics, from female circumcision to sexual identity to finding love as a queer person and hookup culture. The latest of which is Happy Ending. “Happy Ending is a story of two rape survivors (a gay man and a heterosexual woman) who bond after realizing they shared something in common. However, fate plays a trick on them “when their perpetrator walks back into their lives,” says 24-years-old Alice Ishaya, a Theatre Art student who plays one of the lead roles in the film. “Happy Ending [addresses] the trauma rape survivors go through, irrespective of gender and sexual orientation.” The film follows the lives of Tena Zandin (played by Prince Barnabas) and Ladi (played by Alice Ishaya), two massage therapists who were sexually abused by Yuri (played by Darego Ekine) and their experience finding justice. “Happy Ending talks about male rape in our society and society’s veil of silence on male rape victims,” Harrison says. “It is the story of a young man who in his modeling days was drugged and gang-raped by his sponsor. This is actually inspired by a true life story that happened in Awka in 2018.” The story Harrison talks about is of a friend whose experience Harrison believes drove him to suicide. Harrison’s friend, who was a runway model in Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria, had been raped by a gay man whose advances he had rejected. The boy had found it difficult to open up to anyone, which led him to commit suicide. A 2020 research by The Conversation showed that over 90% of reported rape victims in two major Nigerian newspapers were women. While not a conclusive picture of rape in Nigeria, the research is evidence that there are very few reported cases of male rape in Nigeria. Happy Ending explores why. “The story is not new to me because I am already in an industry where what happened in the movie is happening right now,” says Darego, who models alongside acting. “When I started modeling, I had a near experience of being touched to hit a runway. It happened. I had one or two friends that had to do stuff to get on a runway, but nothing came out of it.” Darego also explains why he thinks harassment is so common. “Being beautiful attracts a lot of things; lust and pleasure. I don’t blame the beautifully bodied and faced ones, they didn’t create themselves, but it happens. I’ve been harassed several times by [women] and [men]. I know how to handle such cases – of being harassed. Being good-looking is not your fault, but men would always want to have a taste of it.” While Darego has come to understand getting harassed is not the victims’ fault, most victims do not get to understand this and cannot open up for various reasons. Darego believes rejection and stigmatization play a significant role in why victims stay silent. “There are two things in place – rejection and stigmatization,” he says. “Most people don’t want to feel pitied, even if the victim isn’t rejected after coming out about molestation or rape.