Akinola Davies Jr. feels, as many do, that he grew up in the shadow of his father.
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.
“We don’t remember if it was real or fabricated or whether our two elder siblings told us,” Akinola told TheWrap. “All that mattered was that we felt we had that experience.”
Akinola and Wale share this memory in the opening moments of their new film, “My Father’s Shadow.” Akinola directs the film, which started as a short film script Wale wrote years ago.
“He sent it to me unprompted. I think he’d been watching ‘Oprah’ or something, and I think the prompt in ‘Oprah’ was like, ‘Would you write a letter to a bereaved family member?’ I think he tried about eight times and kept on crying,” Akinola said. “He ended up writing the screenplay and sending it to me, and I had a huge emotional reaction to it.”
When the siblings’ short film “Lizard” won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2021, Akinola knew he’d get a shot at his feature directorial debut. He asked Wale if the two could adapt the “Oprah”-spawned short as a full-length movie as co-writers (“He’s the lead writer,” Akinola clarified. “He’s more the words, I’m more sort of like the pictures and the world-building around it”).
“I think for most of our lives, not knowing our father, he’d been always put on this pedestal, and I think he just became this larger-than-life character that we really couldn’t live up to — hence the title ‘My Father’s Shadow,’” Akinola said. “The 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.”
Davies won the Caméra d’Or – Special Mention after “My Father’s Shadow” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Later on, the film became the UK’s entry to Best International Feature at the Academy Awards. Mubi acquired North American distribution rights for the film.
“My Father’s Shadow” 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) — gone for long stretches working in Lagos — unexpectedly returns home, he agrees to take the two back with him for a day in the city.
“I’m 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,” Akinola said. “I just remember holding bags. Like, so many bags. It’s really jarring, how many bags I had to hold.”
“I jest about it now, but they’re things I sort think so fondly of because I don’t 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.”
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 — someone who’s both hyper-observational and yet unable to fully understand all that they see.
“Children represent a mutual perspective, so the way they see the world, it’s not politically correct. They see what they see and they comment on it and engage with it in that way,” Akinola explained. “For us, it was really important to contextualize Nigeria from the point-of-view of children, because it’s completely imperfect, but it is all we have, and it’s what we love, so we’re just trying to make sense of it.”
In one early version of the script, adults never appeared on-screen — though, that would have prevented the film from finding Dirisu’s powerful leading performance. At the Gotham Awards, Dirisu won Outstanding Lead Performance, while Akinola won Breakthrough Director.
“I think Sope’s performance is really crucial, because it’s a perspective we haven’t seen a lot of, especially this black male father, this father/son relationship,” Akinola said. “Working with him is incredible. I always say to people, ‘If you cast right, that’s 80% of your job as a director, because you’re working with artists who are really invested to the story and they bring ideas.’ Sope really did that.”
“I learned more from him than he probably learned from me, it’s safe to say. I just think he’s a generational talent.”
Akinola and Wale were the same ages as the brothers of “My Father’s Shadow” 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).
“We weren’t cognizant of how deep the politics went. It’s more recently, at least more in my adult life, that I remembered what happened and got a lot more context,” Akinola said. “But certainly at that time, we felt it in our parents and caregivers’ response to things, because they were really excited about the prospect of this election. We’d 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.”
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 “My Father’s Shadow” 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.
“We needed a counterweight to what would’ve 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,” Akinola said. “We’re 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.”
“The journey of the film brought us closer together as brothers, but it also brought us a lot closer together with the country.”
“My Father’s Shadow” is in select theaters now.
