A bold new voice is born with this story of a dad and his two sons set over a single day in Nigeria as it teeters on the edge of a coup. Nigerian-British filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr taps into universal feelings – of wide-eyed childhood discovery, parental responsibility and a feeling of a world spinning out of control – and backdrops it with an immersive sense of controlled chaos.
Written by the director and his older brother Wade and fuelled with their childhood memories, the result is touching, contemplative and unsettling – a film with the gentle impressionist gaze of Moonlight, the hard-scrabble edge of Bicycle Thieves, and a fourth-wall-breaking daring all of its own.
My Father’s Shadow is also coming-of-age story – an unusual one for focusing as much on its struggling but well-intentioned dad, Folarin (Gangs of London’s Sope Dirisu), striving to be a better man, as his two boys, 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and eight-year-old Akin (Godwin Egbo).
It’s 1993 and Nigeria has gone to the polls to elect a new president. Folarin hopes it will be social democrat MKO Abiola, but as he travels with his sons into Lagos, word spreads of a spate of killings by a military regime looking to cling to power. The country is divided. Petrol is scarce. Tension throbs from the frame. ‘Nigeria needs discipline,’ mutters a passenger on their bus ride into the city, advocating for the jackbooted junta to come.
Davies Jr’s bold debut speaks with a murmur and beats like a drum
Into this combustible mix, Folarin takes the two eager boys, hoping to claim the pay packet his employer has been denying him. Their split gazes sends cinematographer Jermaine Edwards’s inquisitive camera off in different directions: the boys upwards to skies dotted with soaring birds; their dad to truckloads of passing soldiers with cold gazes and loaded rifles. A harrowing visit to the seaside, backdropped, in a dystopian touch, by a beached freighter, illustrates the fine balance between exposing the boys to the world and protecting them from it.
The two young actors are both naturals as the boys bicker over their favourite WWE wrestlers, refuse to share ice-cream money and wrap their heads around the hubbub of the city. Dirisu is simmering and sensitive as a man who surfs the line between deadbeat dad and safe harbour.
They’re the heart of a film that sometimes speaks with a murmur and sometimes beats like a drum. There’s been many movies made by Nollywood, the country’s prodigious film industry, but somehow this is the first Nigerian movie to be selected to play at Cannes. On this evidence, the Davies brothers will be back.
My Father’s Shadow premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
