“Children give you permission to dream”: Akinola Davies Jr on My Father’s Shadow

Akinola Davies Jr’s tender, tactile debut about a spectral father figure has sparked comparisons to Aftersun (2022). The British-Nigerian filmmaker joins a wave of directors making personal projects, but My Father’s Shadow – co-written with his brother Wale and loosely based on their childhoods – is also sharply political. Folarin (Sopé Dìrísù) takes his two young sons, Remy and Akin (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo and Godwin Egbo), from their rural village to Lagos, seeking unpaid wages. As the boys reconnect with their absent, enigmatic father, political unrest stirs. The results of the 1993 election are in, and the fragile hope that presidential candidate M.K.O. Abiola will unseat the military dictatorship fills the air. Shot with the intimate, elliptical quality of a memory, this affecting tale of a momentous day is an impressive directorial debut.

Hope Rangaswami: How did you approach filtering this key moment in Nigerian history through children’s eyes? 

Akinola Davies Jr: We were torn about how much we should spoon-feed people. Our anchor point was that it’s from the kids’ perspective and no matter how much you think they should know, they’re not attuned to the politics of what’s happening, they’re more interested in their father. You’re way more curious about his aura, as opposed to what’s going on. At one point, there was a lot more of Folarin’s story, we wanted people to know that he was politically active. But we had to pull it all back – the audience needs to be with the kids and know about as much information as they do. We had to exercise a lot of discipline.

Why are children so central to your storytelling, in this and your short films? 

I loved watching Sesame Street [1969-], Fraggle Rock [1983-87] and The Muppets [1976-81] growing up. I’m hugely influenced by Jim Henson; I wanted to make kids’ TV. I left Nigeria when I was 12 or 13, and because I left at that age, I really romanticise it. That’s always stayed with me – I want to cater to my younger self. Cinematically, children give you permission to dream, to make, I wouldn’t say magical realism, I’d say supernatural drama. A child’s perspective allows you to go into dreamlike vignettes, since kids are so curious about everything. In My Father’s Shadow, we focus a lot on a lot of minutiae, like ants and insects, because kids are closer to the ground. Kids are, like, poking a carcass, because they don’t have those adult filters where you’d think: let’s not poke the dead thing. As a filmmaker, that means I can be a lot more silly and have more fun.

The boys’ mother feels present while being physically absent, while the father is physically present but feels absent. We piece him together in the same way the kids are. 

In this film, we were trying to pinpoint something that we’re grieving. Our mum effectively gave us all the notes to shape Folarin’s character, who we only met as infants. My brother has always had a sense of awe about our dad, whereas I’m quite a mother’s boy, so I’ve always been more defensive because I’ve only ever seen my mum alone. Having the brothers with different expectations of who their dad was meant we could build him up for Remy and then dismantle him for Akin. Sopé has a big part to play as well. Physically, he embodies a very masculine stature – he’s a stud. You can see there’s a strong male figure there. But Sopé also has that ability within his face to completely expose himself. What we hadn’t seen a lot in Black representation of father figures, or just representation of father figures on many levels, is nuance.

On two occasions, you include real footage of Nigeria at that time. What led to that choice? 

I met Adam Curtis maybe three years ago, and when we met, he asked me to look at some footage. It was reportage, some of which was on TV and some that never made it, of Africa in the early to mid-late 90s. And I was like, I want to make a documentary about M.K.O. Abiola, because in the footage I found his funeral. While we were editing My Father’s Shadow, I thought, there’s some footage of 12 June [1993, the day of the election], and that bit of archive is not in the script. I showed the footage to my editor, and he said, let’s put this in. I love the idea of mixing media, but it felt quite permissible, since we didn’t use it out of context. It almost falls off from what we shot. A lot of people haven’t seen the real footage because Nigeria was censored for a while. These are real people we can put alongside the fiction, and pay homage to them.

What has the response been like from other Nigerians?

For the older generation, it’s been very cathartic, because they aren’t used to talking about their experiences of what happened. For the younger generation, it was an introduction to a version of their history that they’re not all super aware of.

► My Father’s Shadow is in UK cinemas now.