by Hudson Moura
My Father’s Shadow, written and directed by Akinola Davies Jr, unfolds in Nigeria in 1993 as a memory-text suspended between dream, testimony, and immediate social reality. The film opens with a boy voice-over—“Dear father, I will see you in dreams…”—that becomes both address and method: narration drifts between the world of the living and the dead, between imagination and recollection, and the resulting ambiguity over who “speaks” (and from when) gives the film much of its power. For viewers unfamiliar with the specific historical pressures surrounding the period—political unrest, circulating rumours, and the atmosphere of imminent rupture—some contextual coordinates may remain indistinct; yet the film turns that very indistinctness into an affective truth, aligning historical uncertainty with the fragility of personal memory.
At its intimate centre are two brothers, Akinola (Godwin Egbo), eight, and Olaremi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo), eleven, who complain that their father, Folari—known as Kapo (Sope Dirisu)—is never home. When Kapo takes them with him to Lagos to seek overdue payment from his boss, the film renders the city legible through sheer proximity: the camera clings to faces in insistent close-up, letting skin and gaze fill the frame against a densely populated, slightly chaotic urban field. The result is an intimacy that feels pointedly personal—almost tactile—so that public space registers less as panorama than as pressure: noise, movement, and crowding filtered through what the father and boys see, endure, and attempt to comprehend.
Kapo is marked by worry and impatience, his body signalling strain (notably, the recurring nosebleeds), and the film quietly lets a question gather around him: is he dying, already becoming the “shadow” the title evokes? Yet alongside this anxious edge, the physical closeness of father and sons repeatedly insists on attachment. The boys’ frustration—how can someone claim love and still be absent?—is matched by the father’s own contradictory condition: he works in the city while the family lives in a village, and the structural distance of labour becomes misread as emotional distance. The film’s drama emerges less from confrontation than from the slow revelation that affection can coexist with incomprehension, especially when economic survival demands separation.
Around this family itinerary, politics hums constantly, almost as background radiation: snatches of conversation nearby, information mediated through newspapers, radio, and television, and the visible circulation of the military in groups. Hope is “in the air” as Kapo and his friends speak of democracy and anticipate an electoral victory for Moshood Abiola(“MKO”), investing the election with the promise of national transformation. The film does not need to turn these expectations into speeches. It stages politics as atmosphere—something overheard, feared, and desired—so that the children’s day with their father becomes inseparable from a collective moment of historical suspense. Kapo’s proximity to these conversations even suggests, without fully spelling it out, a form of political commitment or activism that shadows the family story.
What finally distinguishes My Father’s Shadow is the way it fuses African mythology and orality with the textures of family and politics—not as decorative reference, but as a narrative logic that permits chronology to bend, voices to blur, and the boundary between dream and report to remain productively open. “Dear father, I will see you in dreams…” is not merely a poetic line. It is the film’s ethical stance: an acknowledgement that, in periods of social upheaval, the most faithful account of a father, a country, or a childhood may be one that accepts ambiguity as the very condition of remembering. The result is a beautiful, intimate journey that lingers less as explanation than as felt experience.
Rating: 4.5/5