Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the first-ever Nigerian film to be recognized among the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, plays like a remembered daydream stretched across a political fault line. Set during Nigeria’s fraught 1993 presidential election crisis, the film filters national upheaval through the perspective of two young brothers who’ve been granted a rare day with their mostly absent father. The result is both a coming-of-age story and an act of cinematic reclamation: personal memory reframed as national history.
Catch My Father’s Shadow in theaters beginning February 13th at the Laemmle Royal.
Told from the perspective of eight-year-old Akin and his older brother Remi (played by real-life siblings Godwin Chiemerie and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo), the film begins in a rural village where routine boredom is broken by the sudden return of the boys’ father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu). Charismatic, imposing, and emotionally opaque, he arrives without explanation and impulsively decides to take the boys with him to Lagos. Their mother is absent; the boys readily obey.
Folarin’s mission is simple: collect months of unpaid wages before the country’s political uncertainty curdles into chaos. But the errand swiftly becomes a wandering circuit. The boys encounter men who treat Folarin with peculiar deference, calling him “boss” and “leader.” They are told to show respect to strangers presented as quasi-uncles. Davies smartly keeps exposition thin; political crisis is not explained, but is overheard, glimpsed, felt.
What gives the film its emotional core is the gradual reshaping of the boys’ image of their father. Folarin begins as a near-mythic figure: commanding, sharply dressed, unquestionable. Over the course of the day, however, he becomes both more human and more contradictory. He is strict, evasive, possibly unfaithful, and frequently distracted, yet he is also attentive in bursts, showing them city landmarks, recounting his courtship of their mother, teaching Akin to swim, and bending rules to let them explore forbidden spaces. His philosophy of adulthood—that everything is sacrifice, and one must pray not to sacrifice the wrong thing—lands with tragic force in the context of both family and nation.
The film’s governing question emerges when one of the boys repeats his mother’s strange dictum: that their father’s absence is proof of love, because he is away earning money for them, just as God, who also loves them, remains unseen. Is absence love? The film does not provide an easy answer, but lets the question echo against images of political upheaval, paternal limitation, and inherited memory.
By its end, My Father’s Shadow has outgrown its original container as a story about one family on one day into an ambitious exploration about how children assemble identity from partial knowledge, how nations fracture private lives, and how cinema can serve as an instrument of emotional archaeology. It turns political rupture into family myth—and family myth into something like scripture.
“British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with this deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Akinola Davies Jr. announces himself as a major cinematic voice.” – Murtada Elfadl, Variety
“The historic crisis [of Nigeria’s annulled 1993 election] makes the personal tale reverberate with an inner immensity.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker