My Father’s Shadow Review | Akinola Davis Jr.’s Tremendous Debut Inhabits A Shattered Childhood

It’s the Nigeria of 1993. The political climate is in a churn. The army, long at the helm of national affairs, is faced with fending off an election. It’s the first touted presidential election after a decade of military coup. There are great hopes pinned on Opposition leader, MKO Abiola’s triumph. My Father's Shadow hurls us in the middle of an uneasy transitional moment. Things can either shake up for better or plummet horrifyingly. It’s this unsureness—the verge of a massive swing—that animates the film’s fractures. The semi-autobiographical film directed by Akinola Davis Jr. isn’t afraid of baring its warring, wounded emotions.

The opening of My Father’s Shadow, rich in foreboding, gets an apt measure of its tense tone. A chill hangs while two young brothers, Akin and Remi (played by real-life brothers Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo, both incredibly light and piercing), play and spar. There’s a restlessness drenching the undertone. Suddenly, the camera moves away from the boys and thrusts forth their usually absent father, Folarin (Sopé Dìrísù).

As a lark, the father suggests if his sons would like to accompany him to Laos for sorting out a work issue. They gladly hop in. It’s a chance to sneak away to the capital—a world away from their quiet rural home. Their relationship with their father isn’t the most intimate or transparent. Fola is hardly able to be with his family due to his work in the city. He doesn’t know the food they hate. The chasm between them feels palpable, yet the journey is also one where the father possibly and truly confides in his children for the first time. Sopé Dìrísù plays Folarin as scarred and alert to shifting contours of his surroundings. His eyes betray the horror they have witnessed. He might or might not have been privy to the carnage at Bonny Camp. The military denial of its committed massacre resurfaces in the film every now and then.

Davies Jr. reveals a masterful hand for coiled atmospherics. Images vibrate with danger. Shot on film by Jermaine Edwards, the film feels uncanny and viscous, with terror barely tucked away. It seems frequented with, rather haunted by ghosts of political violence—engines of vast-scale oppression. The military is omnipresent, all-seeing. Equally present are citizens’ ringing disaffection and woes over fuel scarcity as well as a collapsing economy. There’s an amplifying mood of despair as if the country is closing in. All exit doors are shutting. Grumblings are that the country lacks discipline. Even a mere ride from countryside to city is interrupted by noisy disagreements and hostilities. It captures the cauldron of volatility the nation has barrelled into. Can democracy finally emerge?

Menace seems to peek out right around the bend. Cast through the prism of memory, every scene flickers with a sense of agonised wish-fulfilment, whilst teetering between the real and projected. There’s an amazingly accomplished precarity couching characters. Glances exchanged with the military on streets pulse with unspoken history. These are momentary but grind with long familiarities. My Father’s Shadow sits between dread and stolen joy. It’s set in a time perched on the cusp of change. Hope is in the air, yet fear and disillusionment are just as insistent. It’s this see-sawing equation that drapes the film.

The film squarely locates itself within the younger perspective—how the boys absorb and observe the world. The brothers are avid and hungry for experiencing an alien explosion of sights and sounds. Yet, they are also unnerved by the intensity. Accustomed to countryside pace, they’re thrown off the deep end in Lagos. Fola steers them through an overwhelming sensory barrage.

There’s Lagos’ constant bustle, a nagging sense of time running out, people desperately clinching onto remaining shreds of faith in justice. Fola is among the optimistic, but we see his patience thinning. The boys aren’t shown as precocious, but their father’s anxiety doesn’t escape their notice. Remi keeps asking his father if he’s alright.

Violence hovers over the film—the one already experienced and that which is yet to descend. Simultaneously, it entwines both history and future in a fractious handshake. We sense the weight of a historical past that bears heavy on the father and his generation as well as greater doom that the coming days might be hiding. Does Nigeria have the strength to confront and beat its recurring monster? Would it again bend the knee? How long can a regime fuelled by lies and manipulation last? The screenplay, written by Davies Jr. along with his brother Wale Davies, hints at the shape of such questions. But the national canvas then bleeds into the personal. A father’s guilt in not being with his family and the resentment his children weather flower into an unforgettable, blazingly candid scene at the beach. By talking honestly about his lifelong trauma with his child, Fola seems to pre-empt the boys’ muted, nonetheless persistent complaints about his absence. There’s the difficult-to-understand love and learning to distinguish between sacrifices that build on familial ties and those that can annul everything. My Father’s Shadow sifts through tortured memories, tracing a language of love.

My Father's Shadow is now streaming on MUBI.