My Father’s Shadow review: an exquisite exploration of family bonds in 1990s Nigeria

My Father’s Shadow unfolds over a single day. Folarin (Sopé Dìrísù) decides to take his young sons Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and Akin (Godwin Egbo) along on a trip to Lagos, where he has unfinished business. For the boys, the excursion offers a chance to better get to know their magnetic but often absent father and the restless, kaleidoscopic capital that so often steals him away.

Their journey is shaped by unpredictable encounters, cross-country detours and the improvisations of hitchhiking, until dust paths make way for the dizzying sprawl of Lagos. Landmarks such as the Third Mainland Bridge, one of the longest in Africa, announce the colossal city; and we see the lagoon-bound settlement Makoko, where Akinola Davies Jr. filmed his 2023 music video for ‘RAPT’ by the London-based Afrobeat jazz octet Kokoroko. 

Here, the soundtrack is carried by Duval Timothy’s soaring, fluttering piano. The city is lush and dense; we soon learn that fuel is scarce, tensions are high, unsolicited political opinions abundant. It is 1993, the day of Nigeria’s first presidential election in a decade, finally taking place after repeated postponements – a rare instance of electoral politics transcending the country’s ethnic divisions.

The camera is led by the children’s wide-eyed curiosity and low viewpoint as they determine how to react to new surroundings and faces, from the playful winks of strangers to the sinister, ubiquitous military presence. Eyes dart, and a hand rests on another’s hand – or thigh, or temple – offering gentle, silent reassurance between the trio.

Early on in their journey, Akin notices a paraplegic man and Remi chides him: “It’s not nice to stare at people that are suffering.” But Davies’ camera lingers on the variety of those that inhabit and shape Lagos, asking us to drink in the (mis)fortune, hustle, ingenuity, flair, rituals and implicit rules of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest, fastest-growing megacity. This attempt at moral guidance encapsulates the relational dilemmas at the core of the film, experienced differently by each of the three. The relationship between the sons feels natural and effortless – the boys playing Remi and Akin are real-life brothers, and Davies co-wrote the film with his older brother Wale Davies. 

Their script shows an understanding of the pressures on an elder sibling, how Remi must, along with his father, face the challenging questions asked by younger minds, about politics, money, relationships, grief, the afterlife – questions the adult world can barely make sense of. These difficulties become more pronounced as Remi and Akin see their dad through the eyes of his colleagues and mistresses and those who have known him since he was a child. What is novel for the children is often nostalgic for Folarin, grounding the film in questions of intergenerational transmission and continuity.

In one of the most memorable scenes, on an apocalyptic beach reminiscent of the Afrofuturist wastelands of Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood’s The Passion of Remembrance (1986), a religious ceremony of repentance takes place among the rusting remnants of a shipwreck. On this charged shore, Remi is privy to absorbingly open insight concerning his father’s childhood and psyche. With saltwater and sand on their skin, these bonding moments of revelation between father and son, speaking almost as equals, surge with heartache (Remi has an endearing but painful habit of asking “Daddy, are you OK?”).

A moment of violence and bloodshed jolts us from this intimacy: the arrival of a beached whale soon hacked at for its flesh, along with the vultures that continuously circle the Lagosian skyline, reminds us of the lurking proximity of death. The illusory nature of this moment speaks to the young protagonists’ own rampant imagination, the film’s narrative form mimicking the mildly confused or innocently embellished recall of children.

Folarin is haunted by unfinished conversations with his brother, who died during childhood and whose name he feels a duty to keep alive; and more recently by a fatal incident involving political opposition at Bonny Camp military base, only alluded to but clearly haunting him.

As the film announces through a grainy television broadcast, the 1993 elections were annulled, and military rule continued. The next head of state, General Abacha, seized power in a coup d’état and ushered in one of the most brutal dictatorships in Nigeria’s history, under which political parties were banned. 

Premature deaths and aborted political aspirations permeate My Father’s Shadow, emphasising a sense of things cut short, or taken away, a feeling captured in Akin’s bookending refrain, “I will see you in my dreams.” With great tenderness, Davies imagines such dreams, memories and even cinema itself as a portal through which we might resume communion, and honour what could have been.

► My Father’s Shadow is in UK cinemas 6 February.