June 24, 1993 will become known as one of the most consequential days in the brief history of post-colonial Nigeria, but — for the two young boys at the heart of Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical drama “My Father’s Shadow” — that date is destined to be remembered for considerably more personal reasons.
It was on June 24, 1993 that Major General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, refusing to accept that the citizens of Nigeria had overwhelmingly voted for the people’s champion MKO Abiola, annulled the results of the country’s first democratic election since the military coup 10 years earlier. It was also, this poignant and vividly realized film invites us to imagine, on June 24, 1993 that brothers Akin and Remi were invited on a rare trip to Lagos with their dad, Folarin, a strong but mysterious figure in their lives who was often away from their family for months at a time.
Over the course of their wistful and chaotic journey into the big city (a two-hour drive from Ibadan that becomes an odyssey unto itself, thanks to Nigeria’s petrol shortage), the boys will come to see their father in a brilliant new light — one that will light up their dreams for decades to come.
Set at a moment when Nigeria seemed to be on the precipice of a new dawn, “My Father’s Shadow” tempers a nascent sense of hope with a lingering air of hauntedness. The horrors of a recent massacre are splashed across newspaper headlines, but men like Folarin (“Gangs of London” star Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, entrancingly tough and tender all at once) are eager to move forward and invest in their children’s future — to steal it back from the military.
“If you die for Nigeria, you die for nothing,” someone says. Folarin would prefer to stay alive.
His kids barely know him, but — like most fathers, and absent fathers in particular — he looms over their lives like the sky itself, and the boys would struggle to conceive of a world without him in it. And yet, Davies, who naturally co-wrote the movie with his brother Wale, shoots Folarin as if he’s already halfway gone. Despite the basic and tangible need that motivates his trip into Lagos that day (Folarin hasn’t received a paycheck for his last six months of work, and the time has come to collect), there are stretches of this film in which he seems to be a spectral projection of some kind, if only because his sons have never seen him in this context before.
For the time being, Akin and Remi’s imaginations are limited to the WWF matches they stage with paper dolls, and to whatever TV shows they’re able to watch in their mother’s carpet fortress of a living room; the production design by Jennifer Boyd and Pablo Bruhn is fantastically transportive without ever calling undue attention to itself, just as PC Williams’ costumes manage to capture the beauty of Nigeria’s people even in the heart of a crisis. The boys are simply thrilled to get out of the house, and the simple adventure of a trip into the city is enough to make Aki — the younger and more precious of the two — giddy with excitement.
But Aki is also more unforgiving of his dad’s long work absences, and he resents Folarin for making his mother so upset. Played by real-life brothers Godwin (Aki) and Chibuike (Remi) Egbo, both of whom bring an unmistakably lived-in quality to their sibling dynamic, the kids are watchful in the way that children only can be around their parents, and Folarin responds to that attention by performing a mottled kind of masculinity for them to follow.
Dìrísù’s beautiful performance is tough but sweet; it’s a profoundly stressful day for his character, but his frustration never spills over into the kind of anger that we’ve come to expect from similar films about distant and commanding men. In part, that’s because the Davies brothers’ episodic script — which can be opaque one moment and overly instructive the next, in the way of so many debut features — knows to reserve Folarin’s rage for the fight to come when the sun goes down. And in part that’s because Dìrísù’s manner is tinged with resignation from the start, as if he’s already convinced that his sons will only ever know him in their dreams.
“The memories that cause you pain when someone leaves are the same ones that will comfort you later,” he tells the boys before letting them run loose in an empty amusement park. Like so many of the locations in this film (i.e. a beached ship, a bar with secrets), it feels like a place that’s already been gutted of everything but the memory of it.
And so “My Father’s Shadow” resolves as a movie less about a father than it is about the absence of one — a vibrant, deeply felt love letter to Lagos, written in blood. Spotty as the storytelling can be in the space between heart-to-heart conversations and pre-crystalized lines of dialogue (“Everything is sacrifice, you just have to pray you don’t sacrifice the wrong thing”), the slack that Davies creates between Folarin and his children is so well-measured that it hurts just to think that something might sever their relationship completely. What could be worth such a loss, and how might a country hope to survive it?
“Nigeria is hard,” Folarin laments, but he’s resolved to do whatever he can to make it easier for his sons, and also somehow lighter by the grace of his shadow. This heartfelt debut keeps it all in the family, and by the time the film arrives at its touching final moments we’re left with the simple truth that — whatever his flaws as a father — Folarin cared deeply about his children’s future, and in doing so gave them all the reason they needed to cherish their memories of the past.
Grade: B+
“My Father’s Shadow” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release it in the United States.
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