'My Father’s Shadow' is the first Nigerian movie to be chosen in the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection.Lakin Ogunbanwo/Supplied
For British-Nigerian filmmaker and visual artist Akinola Davies Jr., memory is less a record than a living series of spaces – a kaleidoscopic portal where past, present, future, and the imagined collide. Speaking at last year’s Cannes Film Festival about his debut feature, My Father’s Shadow (the first Nigerian movie to be selected in the festival’s Official Selection), Davies Jr. described it as a film made “in service to memory.” That ambition is realized in a work which traces the afterimages of personal and collective memory.
Co-written with his older brother, music executive Wale Davies, the film took several years to develop, with the siblings drawing from the loss of their father when they were young. Set over a single day in Lagos during Nigeria’s 1993 presidential election, the film follows Folarin, a struggling father (played by British-Nigerian actor Sope Dirisu) as he takes his two young sons, Aki and Remi, into the city to collect his unpaid wages. The journey cuts through offices, streets and military checkpoints, tracing a country divided by class and stalled by political failure.
The election restaged in the film remains a watershed moment in Nigerian history. Moshood Abiola – who garnered support across ethnic and regional lines – was declared the winner before the results were annulled by the state’s ruling military junta. Imprisoned until his death in state detention in 1998, Abiola remains an ideologically charged symbol of the country’s envisioned, and curtailed political future.
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Moored within these two narrative frames, My Father’s Shadow positions memory as a space of negotiation, where the optimism of imagined futures is staged alongside the grief of unrealized expectations.
Speaking ahead of the film’s Feb. 13 release in Toronto (expanding to other cities Feb. 20), Davies Jr. reflects on political and personal truth, the responsibilities of authorship, and what it means to make a film that serves not only the self, but collective knowledge.
From left, writer Wale Davies, producer Funmbi Ogunbanwo and director Akinola Davies Jr. at the screening of 'My Father's Shadow' in London, England on Feb. 6.Millie Turner/The Associated Press
Your brother Wale is an artist as well and collaborated with you on the making of the film. What aspects of one another do you see in the final film?
I’m going to borrow from Ryan Coogler, answering a question about violence in Black films, but frame it in a different way: the beauty of film is that it exists at the behest of the author. It’s how the author sees the world. My perception – and my brother’s perception – is one in which many things are true.
Our father died of natural causes, but when we began writing the film together, [Wale] was surprised to learn that I was quite upset with my father for dying. I was surprised at how much he idolized our father – I didn’t know our father well, so I didn’t really know how to idolize him. I probably idolized Wale and my other brother more than our father.
I identify with the flawed aspects of Folarin’s character – the flawed nature of this idea of sacrifice is something we put into the film together; as is the flawed aspect of what it means to be a man. It’s fine to be flawed, but it’s important to investigate how we are the way we are and to speak with each other about those things.
We both also love politics – and we love Nigeria. It may not feel cool to say that, but there’s warmth and optimism for what the country could be. It might be naive, but you sometimes have to be. There are too many people on the breadline who are suffering, so for those of us who have the privilege of being artists, it’s our responsibility to reflect that in our art. We have to allow people to dream.
Can you speak to the influence of Yoruba conceptions of time in the film?
We don’t believe in time in the same way we don’t believe in death. Time isn’t linear; it’s more of a spiral – we believe that you’re always in dialogue with your ancestors, past, present, and future – across a spectrum. When you feel that feeling in your stomach – fight or flight – that’s a reflection of what your ancestors have felt in the past, present, or future. And that informs how we shaped time in the film.
I also think dreams are a portal to reality. I don’t reject the term “magical realism,” but I prefer the term “supernatural drama” because I don’t think that those experiences are magic. They are living information – data – that we can access and engage with and train and develop. So we tried to tell the story by layering ideas about how we feel about death, grief and time, placing it in a form that feels kind of linear, but it’s not.
How do you see this moment in Nigerian political history intertwining with the personal memory work you’re doing in the film?
A lot of my favourite artists – Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Lauryn Hill, Alice Coltrane – always spoke truth to power, even when it wasn’t popular. Truth has to anchor art; it has to be central to it. If we have the privilege of being artists, we must mine truth. Especially as our first offering, we wanted that truth to come from ourselves.
There’s a perception of Nigeria – whether coming from [the state] or projected from outside – that doesn’t necessarily align with lived experience. There are a lot of Nigerians who have left the country under duress and there’s a real polarity in the country where extremes live side by side: there are people with incredible wealth and resources and then there are people living in abject poverty.
In that sense, history and knowledge-sharing are paramount to how the world improves, how communities become self-sufficient, and how people come to see themselves, learn about their history and, importantly, what’s been projected onto them. Individualism has pulled us so far away from what it means to be community, to hold people accountable, and to tell each other parables about our history so we don’t repeat those mistakes.
Being under a military dictatorship will do that to a group of people. A civil war genocidal in nature would do that. A civil war that’s never really worked toward reconciliation will do that. The more we can do, as in our small part as storytellers, is to try and magnify some of those stories so we can learn from ourselves. We have a responsibility to do so.
As a Black filmmaker, I’m aware I may only get the chance to make one film; so, if you only get to make one film, what can it be in service of? It has to be for ourselves – our younger selves, our family, the women in our lives, our community, Nigeria, the diaspora.
This interview has been edited and condensed