{"id":83002,"date":"2026-02-14T02:22:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T02:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/83002\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T02:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T02:22:10","slug":"how-my-fathers-shadow-came-out-of-political-unrest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/83002\/","title":{"rendered":"How ‘My Father’s Shadow’ Came Out of Political Unrest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Akinola Davies Jr. feels, as many do, that he grew up in the shadow of his father.<\/p>\n

He died when Akinola and his older brother Wale were both very young, almost too young to remember. Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, Akinola and Wale shared only a single memory of their father, of the three of them playing on a bed together.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t remember if it was real or fabricated or whether our two elder siblings told us,\u201d Akinola told TheWrap. \u201cAll that mattered was that we felt we had that experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Akinola and Wale share this memory in the opening moments of their new film, \u201cMy Father\u2019s Shadow.\u201d Akinola directs the film, which started as a short film script Wale wrote years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe sent it to me unprompted. I think he\u2019d been watching \u2018Oprah\u2019 or something, and I think the prompt in \u2018Oprah\u2019 was like, \u2018Would you write a letter to a bereaved family member?\u2019 I think he tried about eight times and kept on crying,\u201d Akinola said. \u201cHe ended up writing the screenplay and sending it to me, and I had a huge emotional reaction to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the siblings\u2019 short film \u201cLizard\u201d won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2021, Akinola knew he\u2019d get a shot at his feature directorial debut. He asked Wale if the two could adapt the \u201cOprah\u201d-spawned short as a full-length movie as co-writers (\u201cHe\u2019s the lead writer,\u201d Akinola clarified. \u201cHe\u2019s more the words, I\u2019m more sort of like the pictures and the world-building around it\u201d). <\/p>\n

\u201cI think for most of our lives, not knowing our father, he\u2019d been always put on this pedestal, and I think he just became this larger-than-life character that we really couldn\u2019t live up to \u2014 hence the title \u2018My Father\u2019s Shadow,\u2019\u201d Akinola said. \u201cThe more we got into the work, we realized that humanizing him took him off the pedestal, because we realized, you know, to be human is to be flawed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davies won the Cam\u00e9ra d\u2019Or \u2013 Special Mention after \u201cMy Father\u2019s Shadow\u201d premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Later on, the film became the UK\u2019s entry to Best International Feature at the Academy Awards<\/a>. Mubi acquired North American distribution rights for the film.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Father\u2019s Shadow\u201d follows two young brothers (played by real-life siblings Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) living on the Nigerian countryside in the days of the 1993 election. When their father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu) \u2014\u00a0gone for long stretches working in Lagos \u2014 unexpectedly returns home, he agrees to take the two back with him for a day in the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m the youngest, so I was always closer to my mom and left home last, so it was just constant side quests with aunts, with uncles, with especially my mom driving around Lagos, going to the market, holding bags,\u201d Akinola said. \u201cI just remember holding bags. Like, so many bags. It\u2019s really jarring, how many bags I had to hold.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI jest about it now, but they\u2019re things I sort think so fondly of because I don\u2019t do them anymore. I think what we were really trying to do is just remind ourselves of sort of mundane aspects of the context of who we are as people and how we grew up. It exists less and less, so I think this is just honoring it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The film, shot beautifully by Jermaine Edwards, often looks like an image ripped from the past. Edwards and Akinola use the camera as a tool of memory, often placing it in the perspective of a young child \u2014 someone who\u2019s both hyper-observational and yet unable to fully understand all that they see. <\/p>\n

\u201cChildren represent a mutual perspective, so the way they see the world, it\u2019s not politically correct. They see what they see and they comment on it and engage with it in that way,\u201d Akinola explained. \u201cFor us, it was really important to contextualize Nigeria from the point-of-view of children, because it\u2019s completely imperfect, but it is all we have, and it\u2019s what we love, so we\u2019re just trying to make sense of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one early version of the script, adults never appeared on-screen \u2014\u00a0though, that would have prevented the film from finding Dirisu\u2019s powerful leading performance. At the Gotham Awards<\/a>, Dirisu won Outstanding Lead Performance, while Akinola won Breakthrough Director.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Sope\u2019s performance is really crucial, because it\u2019s a perspective we haven\u2019t seen a lot of, especially this black male father, this father\/son relationship,\u201d Akinola said. \u201cWorking with him is incredible. I always say to people, \u2018If you cast right, that\u2019s 80% of your job as a director, because you\u2019re working with artists who are really invested to the story and they bring ideas.\u2019 Sope really did that.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI learned more from him than he probably learned from me, it\u2019s safe to say. I just think he\u2019s a generational talent.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Akinola and Wale were the same ages as the brothers of \u201cMy Father\u2019s Shadow\u201d were when the 1993 Nigerian Election occurred. What was meant to be a transition to democracy following a 1983 military coup quickly soured as the results of presidential elections were drawn out and, ultimately, annulled (it was widely believed that Social Democratic Party candidate Moshood Abiola won the election, which was eventually confirmed by then-military ruler Ibrahim Babangida).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe weren\u2019t cognizant of how deep the politics went. It\u2019s more recently, at least more in my adult life, that I remembered what happened and got a lot more context,\u201d Akinola said. \u201cBut certainly at that time, we felt it in our parents and caregivers\u2019 response to things, because they were really excited about the prospect of this election. We\u2019d been under a severe authoritarian, brutal, violent, oppressive, censorship-driven military dictatorship for almost three decades post-independence, and also a very brutal genocidal civil war, so I think our parents were just kind of looking for anything that was next, and this idea of democracy was like a golden carrot sort of dangled in front of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Akinola remembers the day the election was overturned, getting pulled out of school and witnessing terrifying scenes on the streets (an image of a burning car leapt from his brain to \u201cMy Father\u2019s Shadow\u201d three decades later). While the 1993 election crisis was not initially conceived as part of the film, the brothers soon realized they wanted to tell more than a straightforward family story.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe needed a counterweight to what would\u2019ve just been a really lovely familial story. How can we make it bigger? How can we expand it? I think the expansion came in the form of the politics,\u201d Akinola said. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about fatherhood and the promise of fatherhood and values and growth and family life, and then the balance was nationhood and statehood and this idea of this maverick politician bringing this young country, instilling values and growth and political tension.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe journey of the film brought us closer together as brothers, but it also brought us a lot closer together with the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Father\u2019s Shadow\u201d is in select theaters now.<\/p>\n

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