The wearing of so many creative hats (a legitimate feat for a debut) also produces the film’s most visible seam. There is a tension between Emmanuel, the director, who wants to make something formally ambitious, and Emmanuel the subject, who wants to be fully seen. That tension is never quite resolved, and the film’s bloated runtime reflects it: a story that would benefit from a ruthless external edit, that mistakes length for emotional weight and repetition for depth.
Movie Review
Call of My Life, written by Uzoamaka Power and directed by Dammy Twitch, is a film that knows this language and has decided, with considerable charm and only occasional uncertainty, to go against it. Power plays Soluchi, a call centre agent whose emotional texture runs at a frequency the city around her has not been calibrated to receive. She’s quirky and high spirited. She spins on the pavement on her way to work. She gives herself completely to whatever she sets her heart on, which in the film’s opening act is Kalu (Zubby Michael), a financially comfortable Igbo businessman whose love language is his debit card
Behind The Scenes is psychological realism and trauma-focused. Instead of planning the mise-en-scence, and regulating characters’ performances to make them convincingly impactful, the directors Funke Akindele and Tunde Olaoye rely on excessive emotions to arouse pity. Their failure in monitoring the incidents resulted in the calamity that befalls Aderonke’s lawyer, Victor (Uzor Arukwe).
Putting a city’s name in the title of a film is indirectly promising the audience that the city is central to the soul of the story. Aba has an incredibly distinct, commercial and bustling identity. The Aba setting of this film, however, is nominal; there is nothing visually tying this film to the city. It could have been set in any city but Aba.
Nollywoodʼs suffering mother, in its earliest and most honest incarnations, had something of the former. In most of its contemporary iterations and certainly in its most commercially successful one, it has become the latter. The mother suffers, the children unite, the audience weeps, the credits roll, the naira accumulates…
Short film production has been on the rise with producers taking advantage of the availability…
This section humanises Wizkid by refusing spectacle. Even at this height of his success, the documentary insists, greatness is still labour. Fame does not erase anxiety; it simply magnifies what is at risk. And when he learns that his ailing (now deceased) mother’s health has worsened, almost colliding with his struggles to get his set ready, we see the pain behind the fame.
Aside from its focus on the persistent pull of depression and suicidal thoughts, the film also shows how younger people battling depression and other mental health challenges seek support through social media like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook to help themselves heal. While occasionally helpful, these groups often devolve into corrosive and illogical spots for peer pressure, where suicidal tendencies are encouraged and reinforced.
A strong thread running through the film is the idea of desperation, not just the kidnappers’, not just the families’, but a national kind of desperation that corrodes values and bends every character toward self-preservation.
Despite all these, My Father’s Shadow is not a dirge. Its fragmented form allows for moments of tenderness and beauty, even humour. These flashes underscore the resilience of ordinary Nigerians, who, despite betrayals by their leaders, continue to love, to sing, to imagine futures for their children.
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.
For a movie that runs for two hours, its pacing is incredibly rushed, with timelines not clearly delineated. Jaiye proposes to Adaora within two months of dating her, and they get married with very little on-screen chemistry allowed to truly develop. What is even more implausible is how such a successful business woman is forced into such a naïve and juvenile arrangement, where she cannot spot the glaring ulterior motive, external pressures be damned.