Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow is a small story: two boys, one father, one day in Lagos. But it carries the weight of a family’s grief and a nation’s broken promise.
Set during the tense days of Nigeria’s 1993 presidential election, the film follows Remi and Akin as they tag along with their mostly absent father, Folarin, on a trip to Lagos to collect six months of unpaid wages. What begins as an adventure becomes something far deeper: a portrait of fatherhood, memory, and a country holding its breath.
Here are ten things that stayed with us long after the credits rolled.
Spoiler warning: this article discusses key moments and the ending of the film.
1. Title Card Placement
The title card doesn’t appear at the start of the film. It arrives only after the story has ended, and that one choice changes how the whole film lands.
For ninety minutes, we walk beside Folarin without fully understanding what we’re watching. When the title finally appears, everything clicks into place. We’ve been following a man who is already fading, a presence his sons will carry as a memory rather than a father. Holding back the title until the end turns it into the film’s final line, and it’s a devastating one.
2. The performances
Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù is extraordinary as Folarin. He plays a man who is gentle but firm, proud but tired, and always holding something back from his sons for their own protection. Much of his performance lives in his eyes: regret, hope, and a quiet defiance, especially when he stares down soldiers on the streets of Lagos.
Real-life brothers Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo are just as impressive as Akin and Remi. They never feel like “movie children.” They’re curious, stubborn and funny, and yes, they refuse to share their yoghurt.
Some of the film’s most charming moments are the small ones that feel unscripted. On the packed bus to Lagos, one of the boys ends up on a stranger’s lap, a scene anyone who has ridden a crowded danfo will instantly recognise. Later, the boys wink and pull faces at random drivers and strangers, turning a tense journey into their own private game. These moments remind us that however heavy the day becomes, they are still children.
The supporting cast completes the picture, giving Lagos a lived-in truthfulness that never rings false.
3. Bonny Camp: The Shadow Over The city
The politics of 1993 are never delivered as a history lesson. Instead, they seep in through rumour and print.
Several newspaper headlines about what happened at Bonny Camp appears, and from then on the incident keeps resurfacing: in whispers, in arguments on the bus, in uneasy conversations between adults. Every reference tightens the tension. We don’t need to be told how dangerous the city is becoming; we feel it in what people are afraid to say out loud.
It’s a smart way of keeping the national crisis present without letting it overpower the family story at the heart of the film.
4. Their Mother’s presence
The boys’ mother is barely on screen, yet she’s never really gone. She looms over the whole day, a constant reminder of the reality waiting at home.
When Akin asks his father whether he loves Mommy, the answer doesn’t satisfy him: “But she’s always sad.” When Folarin points out the National Theatre and mentions that their mother used to come there to watch plays, we glimpse a woman who once had a life beyond waiting.
However exciting the trip to Lagos becomes, her absence keeps pulling us back to what this family has already lost, and what it is about to lose.
5. The Soundtrack
Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra’s score never tells you how to feel. It seeps in, ambient and slightly off-kilter, mirroring the boys’ wonder and confusion as they take in a world they don’t fully understand.
“Journey to Lagos” is the standout. It captures the thrill of leaving home for the big city while quietly hinting that something isn’t quite right. It’s the kind of music you’ll find yourself humming days later.
6. Cinematography and Visual style
My Father’s Shadow that trusts images over explanation.
The opening scene is built on emptiness: a quiet house, still air, and a sense that something is missing before we know what it is. Throughout the film, Davies Jr. and cinematographer Jermaine Edwards let faces, spaces and silences do the talking. The camera is steady at home and becomes restless once the family reaches Lagos, so we feel the shift from safety to uncertainty without a word being said.
Cutaways and quick cuts break up scenes the way memory does, jumping from a face to a detail to a sound before we’ve had time to settle. Flashbacks of the father slip in without warning, brief glimpses of Folarin from another time that make him feel both present and already remembered. Alfonso Cauron’s 360 degree camera one shotstyle from Children of Men is well employed to showcase the sensory overload of the socio-political collapse of the Nation from the eyes of the brothers.
The result is that we never experience the day in a straight line. We experience it the way a child might recall it years later: in vivid, scattered fragments.
7. Symbolism
My Father’s Shadow is a film you’ll want to watch twice, because the second time you notice how early it tells you where it’s going. Death is announced from the very first frames, not through dialogue, but through the world around the characters.
The opening. Flies buzz through the stillness, a detail that feels ordinary until you remember that flies gather where life is ending. The burial fabrics in those early scenes are an even clearer signal: before we’ve properly met Folarin, the film has already laid out the cloth of mourning. Dead plants and decaying fruit sit in plain sight around the home, suggesting a household where things have been left to wither in someone’s absence. Nothing is lingered on, and that’s the point. Like the children, we register these things without understanding them.
The circling birds. Birds move in circles overhead throughout the film. They can be read as waiting, the way scavengers circle something about to fall. They also suggest a loop: a family and a nation going round and round without ever arriving anywhere new. That idea of being stuck runs through the whole day. The bus runs out of fuel halfway to Lagos. Folarin keeps returning to his workplace for wages that never come. The country has voted for change, only to watch it be taken away. Everyone is moving, but nobody is getting where they need to go.
The nosebleeds. Folarin’s body carries a warning too. His recurring nosebleeds are small and easy to wave away, and he does wave them away. But each one quietly reminds us that the strong, protective figure his sons are studying all day is more fragile than he looks.
The beach. At the shore, many of these threads come together. Worshippers in white garments pray fervently at the water’s edge, birds wheel across the sky, and people hack at a beached whale. Something enormous and majestic lies dead on the sand while the crowd carves it up. It works as an image of a father nearing his end, and just as powerfully as an image of a nation’s hope being picked apart. The water carries its own weight: Folarin tells his sons about the brother he lost to drowning, the brother Remi was named after. The sea holds both the family’s joy and its grief.
The dreams. Above all, there are dreams. The recurring line “I will see you in my dreams” frames the entire film and echoes a Yoruba understanding of dreams as a place where the living and the dead can still meet. Seen this way, My Father’s Shadow isn’t only about a father’s death. It’s about where he goes afterwards: into memory, into dreams, and into the names and shadows he leaves behind with his sons.
8. Dialogue
The script, written by Akinola Davies Jr. and his brother Wale Davies, is sparse but sharp, and several lines land like a punch.
When Folarin explains that he stays away to earn money for the family, Akin’s reply is simple and crushing: “But they don’t even pay you.” Remi’s innocent question about whether leaving because of love is why they cannot see God is funny and heartbreaking at the same time.
On the bus to Lagos, strangers argue about the country’s future. One man insists that Nigeria’s problem is indiscipline, while another holds on to the hope that things will be better for the next generation. These snatches of everyday conversation carry the film’s politics more effectively than any speech ever could.
9. The Filmmakers’ Personal Connection
What gives My Father’s Shadow its emotional weight is how personal it is.
Akinola and Wale Davies lost their father when they were very young. Akinola was just 20 months old, and Wale was five. The brothers have said they share only one memory of him, playing together on a bed, and they placed that memory in the film’s opening. They have also spoken about seeing their father differently: Wale idolised him, while Akinola admits he was angry at his father for dying.
Knowing this reframes the film as an act of imagination: a day the brothers never got to have, rebuilt from fragments, family stories and longing. The line “I will see you in my dreams” reads less like dialogue and more like a dedication.
10. Costume and 90s Nostalgia
My Father’s Shadow is a time machine to early-’90s Nigeria.
Shot on 16mm, the film has a warm, grainy texture that feels like an old family photograph come to life. The details are lovingly chosen: Rashidi Yekini posters, old-style Fanta bottles, revival crusade posters on the walls, and the boys’ paper cut-outs of their favourite wrestlers. Folarin’s purple striped shirt, sleeves rolled up and worn with fading elegance, says as much about him as any line of dialogue.
Perhaps the biggest achievement of the Art/Production department is having to transport present day Tinubu Square and it’s environs to the 90s.
For anyone who grew up in that era, it’s a powerful dose of memory. For anyone who didn’t, it’s a window into a Nigeria that feels both distant and strangely familiar.
Final thoughts
The strangers winking at the brothers was hilarious.
My Father’s Shadow is a love letter to a father, to Lagos, and to a Nigeria that could have been. It’s patient, poetic and quietly devastating, and it earns every bit of the acclaim it has received, from its historic Cannes selection to its place among the finest Nigerian films in recent memory.
If you haven’t seen it yet, go in with an open heart, and stay until the title card.
My Father’s Shadow is streaming on Netflix in Africa and on MUBI in select regions.
