Nigeria can sometimes present with a curious case of arrested development; an adult stuck in the body of an infant. This is because the more things change, the more they seem to remain the same. This is what Akinola Davies’ semi-biographical film My Father’s Shadow, a family drama with a socially realistic outlook, reveals with piercing clarity.
Set over the span of a single day in 1993, the film unspools as fragmented vignettes: half dream, half memory, of a family’s struggle and Lagos as a historical spot of Nigerian politics, economics, and military violence.
After months of absence, the estranged father, Folarin (Sọpẹ Dìrísù), returns to his boys, Remi and Akinola (played by real-life brothers Marvellous and Godwin Agbo), who have longed for his return. But to their dismay, he is already preparing to leave again, even without seeing their mother, Bola, who travelled to the village. The boys plead with him to wait for her return, but he refuses. Reluctant to leave them alone, Folarin takes them to Lagos, where he works in a factory.
Their journey to Lagos is harsh yet laced with humour, depicting their perseverance in times of hardship. When they finally arrive in Lagos, the boys witness the city’s vastness, their father’s daily struggles, and the mounting political tension.
The film offers a stylised portrait of poverty, electoral violence, and military oppression, filtered through the childhood memories of the filmmakers. Behind its dreamlike haze lies a brutal revelation: nothing has changed in Nigeria for more than thirty years. It feels like history repeating itself. The fictional denials of military atrocities at Bonny Camp in the 1990s eerily foreshadow the government’s reticence regarding the Lekki Toll Plaza massacre on October 20, 2020. People still queue endlessly for fuel, and poverty is still prevalent. The country still lurches from crisis to crisis, unchanged in its dysfunction.
The screenplay, originally written by Wale Davies and polished by his brother Akinola Davies, who also directs the film, balances the personal with the political. Memory is slippery here, partial, fictionalised, even reconstructed from photographs, media clips, or family lore. But its purpose is compelling: Wale remembers the disruption of his youth under military rule, and through his writing demands that we remember too.
The film’s centrepiece, unsurprisingly, is the annulment of the 1993 Presidential election, a moment of profound hope curdled into despair. Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola (MKO), candidate of the Social Democratic Party, was widely seen as the people’s choice. Yet General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the result, denying Nigeria its lawful transition to civilian rule. What followed were street protests, arrests, death, and blood on the nation’s hands. My Father’s Shadow does not try to sanitise this history. It holds the camera to it, asking us: three decades later, what does Babangida’s belated admission that Abiola won the election even mean? Who does it serve?
Besides its history of poverty and violence, the film is most haunting when it narrows its lens to the character of Folarin, a spectral father figure who drifts through Lagos like a ghost. His children regard him with awe and suspicion, as though he is already half-departed. Strangers, too, treat him as an apparition. A woman at an eatery recoils at his presence; a man at an amusement park hands him a message to deliver to his dead wife, then sings the Lijadu Sisters’ “Arin Aro” in a mournful refrain. The surrealism lands not as a mere aesthetic choice but as a metaphor: Folarin is both alive and already dead, a casualty of a broken system, leaving behind fragments of himself in his sons. His haunting becomes a stand-in for the nation’s own, ghosts of lost elections, lost lives, and lost promises.
Davies’ film joins a long line of politically charged neo realistic works. Much like Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, it reminds us that context is inseparable from form. The families in Rossellini’s Rome were casualties of war and repression; Folarin and his family are casualties of dictatorship. Like Burnett’s characters, Folarin and his friends are caught in cycles of poverty. These are not simply backdrops but existential conditions about Nigeria and its citizens. And Lagos here is not just a backdrop but a character open to diverse interpretation: restless, wounded, broken and impossible to ignore.
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. If anything, the film’s surreal flourishes suggest the radical power of memory: how even fractured recollections can resist official erasure.
Besides Folarin and his boys, whose actions, reactions, and journey drive the narrative, others are mere passengers in this movie. Sọpẹ Dirisu, portraying Folarin, occasionally appears stiff due to his unfamiliarity with the film’s language and culture. However, he ultimately delivers a commendable performance. The Egbo brothers, playing Remi and Akinola, hold their own and contribute effectively to the film, despite being new to acting.
My Father’s Shadow reveals a devastating and necessary truth: Nigeria has been here before, and unless the cycles of denial and violence are broken, it will be here again.
**Michael Kolawole is a screenwriter, playwright, poet and cultural journalist/critic. Catch him on X @mykflow
