(The first Nigerian film to be selected in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes Film Festival, where it also received the Caméra d’Or Special Mention for Best First Feature (another first).)
It’s been seventeen years since I lost my father, and lately I’ve found myself clinging more and more to the few clear memories that remain. They come back in flashes – like the day he took me to the Moshood Abiola National Stadium (named after the man who purportedly won the annulled June 12, 1993 election) to watch the Super Eagles play.
I remember the noise, the heat, the sea of bodies, and the feeling of being lifted above it all as he carried me on his shoulders after the match (thankfully, Nigeria won). It’s one of the few memories that hasn’t blurred with time, perhaps because it captures everything a child ever really understands about their father – protection, pride, presence.
Watching Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, co-written with his brother Wale Davies (Tec of Show Dem Camp), I was reminded of that day. Not because our stories are the same, but because Davies’ film, in its quiet way, becomes a meditation on memory itself – on what remains of fathers when they are gone, and how their absence shapes the lives that continue in their wake.
My Father’s Shadow arrives not as a declamatory manifesto but as a patient, interior ledger: a film that keeps a slow, exacting account of what absence costs a family and, by extension, what political failure costs a country. Where many politically inflected films lean on spectacle or polemic, Davies trusts a child’s attention span and the small mechanics of everyday life to do the heavy lifting. The result is a film that feels less like an explanation than a bequest: it hands you fragments, sensory reliquaries, and asks you to become their custodian.
On the surface, the story is simple. Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) turns up unannounced at a modest home outside Lagos and takes his two sons, Remi and Akin (real-life brothers Godwin and Chibuike Egbo), on a one-day trip into the city to collect months of unpaid wages. The mission, on paper, is domestic and small; in practice it expands into an odyssey that moves from amusement parks and bukas to the trembling edges of civic catastrophe — the annulled June 1993 election looms like bad weather in the background. What Davies accomplishes is to let the personal and political refract through one another until the lines between them is completely indistinguishable.
Davies’ most radical formal choice is to give the film, almost entirely, to the boys’ point of view. This isn’t nostalgia dressed up as innocence; it is a deliberate method for making the audience feel how historical knowledge is transmitted across generations; fragmented and sensory and half-sensed.
The boys discern political truths as they learn about their father: through overheard arguments, a smell, a newspaper headline glimpsed in passing, or a stranger’s remark on a bus. In one of the film’s most telling exchanges, a child reasons about God and absence in the same breath as asking whether love can be measured by presence. The question refracts into the film’s central problem: how do you reckon with promises by fathers and governments that are not kept?
If the boys are our sensors, Lagos is the film’s memory bank: a palimpsest of play, peril, commerce, prayer and state violence. Davies and cinematographer Jermaine Edwards (working on 16mm) let the city reveal itself through texture; crowded buses that die mid-journey, roadside bukas humming with life, the National Theatre’s hulking presence, the sudden open air of a beach. The camera’s attitude shifts as the family leaves the village for Lagos: steadier frames at home, more handheld, immersive work in the city, a visual grammar that maps safety and exposure.
Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù gives a performance that resists caricature. Folarin is neither saint nor villain but a complicated trade-off: a man who leaves to seek work, who insists his absences are sacrifices, yet whose life is also marked by compromises and mysteries. Dìrísù’s body carries both tenderness and a kind of fatigue; his softer moments with the boys are convincing precisely because they are fragile. Small flaws in accent or cadence do not diminish the emotional truth he brings to the role. Importantly, Folarin’s unpaid wages function as a structural metaphor. His inability to get paid is not merely a plot point; it is an index of a larger system that extracts labor without recompense. Davies makes the personal political without turning the film into agitprop: national dysfunction is allowed to be felt as humiliation, as shame, as the erosion of dignity.
Shot on 16mm and edited with a taste for quiet associative montage, My Father’s Shadow often communicates by suggestion: a nosebleed, a flock of circling birds, a sudden jolt to archival footage. Those somatic and cinematic intrusions do more than agitate the narrative; they testify.
The nosebleed, recurring and inexplicable at first, reads like a bodily echo of political harm – trauma that refuses to stay confined to the public square. Likewise, when Davies inserts archival material from June 1993 and the film’s private world collides with public record; the rupture is not didactic but electric. The viewer experiences the analytic moment as a physical shock, rather than an explanatory paragraph.
Sound design deserves its own mention: church chants bleeding into calls from the minaret, street noise, a preacher’s overfull cadence; these are the film’s chorus, and they are deployed not simply for authenticity but to create a communal affective field. The film’s music and ambient score keep us inside the boys’ emotional register, where political climate is weather you feel in your chest.
Godwin and Chibuike Egbo, as Remi and Akin, are the film’s moral compass. Their quarrels, petty jealousies, and moments of tenderness feel lived-in; casting real brothers pays off in the small, unforced rhythms of intimacy. The screenplay layers mythic family histories with the quotidian. The result is a narrative that accumulates weight through the small and simple; objects, tastes, playground rituals, rather than a parade of plot points.
That same focus on the boys’ point of view is, however, the film’s source of both power and frustration. Several female characters – most notably the mother – remain underwritten, present more as a moral horizon than as fully realized interior subjects. This absence is thematically coherent, but it also guts some of the film’s potential complexity; by confining the story to a largely male perspective, My Father’s Shadow occasionally sacrifices relational fullness for thematic focus.
The film culminates in a third act that many viewers will find both beautiful and vexing. Davies embraces ambiguity: flashforwards, dream logic, and an ending that refuses clean catharsis. For some, this elliptical finish will magnify the film’s power as it leaves the viewer inhabiting a grief that persists. For others, it can feel like a withholding, a decision to avoid making explicit political claims when the stakes feel enormous. I read that choice as ethical rather than evasive. Davies’ refusal to reduce the past to a tidy lesson respects the experience of those who lived it because memory can be messy, partial, layered and insists that remembering is an ongoing activity rather than a closed case.
My Father’s Shadow is not a film that tells you what to think about 1993 or about Nigeria’s long arc of disappointments. It’s a film that teaches you how to feel history: to smell it, taste it, hold it against your ribs. It’s a portrait of a father whose love is messy and incomplete, and a nation whose promises frequently arrive late or not at all.
As a debut feature, Davies’ film is already confident in its restraint. It’s a film about what is left when rhetoric fails: small, human artifacts of care, the improbable tenderness of a day at the beach, the half-understood truths children carry into adulthood. If you go to My Father’s Shadow expecting tidy answers, you will leave wanting. If you go willing to be taught how to remember, you will leave with something weighty and hard-won: an understanding that to remember is also to be accountable – to family, to country, to history itself.
*** Joseph Jonathan is a film journalist and critic whose work explores the intersections of history, culture and film
