In “My Father’s Shadow,” the deeply moving debut feature of British-Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr., two young brothers—Aki (Godwin Egbo) and Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo)—travel with their often-absent father, Fọlárìn (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), from their rural home in the Nigerian countryside and into the bustling streets of Lagos, where they spend a day observing and slowly bonding with the old man they barely know.
Set on the eve of Nigeria’s 1993 election crisis, as political unrest sent shockwaves through the country’s capital, the film—co-written by Davies and his brother, Wale Davies—was inspired by the relationship its creators had to their own late father, who died from epilepsy when the two of them were very young. Building on that tragic real-life context, the brothers approached their feature as an opportunity to revisit a sociopolitical turning point in recent Nigerian history and to depict on screen the emotional vibrancy of ‘90s Lagos as they recalled it from spending time there with their mother throughout childhood.
Shooting on location while evoking a lost time and place in gorgeously textured 16mm, “My Father’s Shadow” is a longing snapshot of a country and the people who populate it, as much as it is an evocation of one family’s intimate reunion. Representing the linguistic landscape of Nigeria with dialogue in Yoruba, Pidgin, and English, as well as a rich cross-section of the country’s culture—visible through period-accurate clothing, a swirl of set pieces, and rapt attention to the energetic rhythms of the Nigerian capital—the film also features a magnificent lead performance by Dìrísù, who gradually surfaces Fọlárìn’s closely held anguish and paternal frustration to his children as their day in Lagos draws to a foreboding close.
“My Father’s Shadow” first screened at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section and won the Special Mention for the Camera d’Or prize. Critically acclaimed throughout its subsequent tour of the international festival circuit, the film was later nominated for 12 British Independent Film Awards, with Davies Jr. winning the prize for Best Director. The film was also selected as the United Kingdom’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature, though it didn’t ultimately make the Academy’s shortlist; the Gothams, however, awarded the film two prizes: Breakthrough Director (for Davies Jr.) and Outstanding Lead Performance (for Dìrísù).
MUBI, which acquired distribution rights for the film in multiple territories prior to its world premiere, is releasing “My Father’s Shadow” in U.S. theaters starting Feb. 13. Ahead of the release, Davies Jr. sat down with RogerEbert.com to discuss the visual language of dreams, collaborating with his brother to tell this semi-autobiographical story, the difficulty of transporting film in and out of Lagos, and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“My Father’s Shadow” came from a deeply personal place. What can you tell me about the process of developing this story, which is rooted in your childhood, into a feature film alongside your brother, Wale Davies?
We’d made a short film, “Lizard,” which won the Sundance Jury Prize, and the reaction to that film was extremely overwhelming for us. We hadn’t quite anticipated winning anything; we just wanted to test out making a film, and the response was incredible. It was also during lockdown.
In thinking about what to do next, we really wanted to create something in service of our younger selves, our families and friends, and the women in our lives. And my brother had written the screenplay [for “My Father’s Shadow”] years before. It had an emotional impact on me when I read it; I thought, “What better way to spend the next few years than creating work together and getting better acquainted as brothers on a subject matter that we never really spoke about as kids?” And so Wale graciously allowed me to develop “My Father’s Shadow” into a feature.
At every point along the way, there was a level of understanding of the craft of what we were doing and how we wanted to shape that craft. The film could have ended in many ways, but we always leaned on being honest, drawing on ourselves, wanting to be the authors of our story in a way we could learn from first, before we started using other people’s material. That was quite important to us, mining ourselves for the story.
When a person loses a parent, there’s a consistent elephant in the room, about that person who isn’t there, what their trades were like, what they were like as people. Whenever we go out into Lagos, our father’s name always reverberates back to us, because he was a larger-than-life character people knew, apparently. We’d always experienced this. We’d go into Lagos, and people would tell us about our father. It felt like we learned enough over the years—being young men and then adults, hearing more mature stories—that we could put that into a character.
For my brother and me, our earliest and only experience of our father was playing on a bed with him, which we tried to put in the opening sequence. That’s the only memory we have. We don’t know whether it was a dream, a fabrication, or something someone told us, but what mattered was that we felt we had that memory. And that was the feeling we were trying to put in the film. We were trying to work from a place of holding this day as a memory—however you see it, whether it’s a dream or a ghost story—and wanted it to feel like something that the boys palpably had, that they could hold in their hands and remember forever.
Film is such a beautiful medium for connecting. After collaborating as closely as you did with your brother on the screenplay, how did your dynamic continue to play out through production in Lagos, actually making the film?
That’s a fantastic question. I don’t think anyone’s asked me that. What I always say, which I think really works well for Wale and me together, is that we understand there needs to be a division of labor. We both can’t do the same work. We have strengths and weaknesses. He loves the spoken word. He loves the written word. He’s one of the most well-read people I know, and he swallows books whole, in almost one sitting. I’m quite the opposite. I do enjoy books, but they really have to captivate my imagination. I need to be able to see the images from the words. I’m more aligned with pictures, how a particular picture can tell a story: with what’s in the fore-, mid-, and background of a picture, how that communicates what’s in the story. We complement each other very well in that way.
In production, my brother was more of a producer. He’s very withdrawn. He’d done his main part in the writing, and he left the production to me—although, within production, he’d offer a note or two on performance, based on how things were supposed to be working. I’m very accepting of that within the process; I’ve worked in commercials, and working with a brother is much better than working for a client, I’ll tell you that much.
In the edit, it was completely different, because my brother wasn’t present. He chose not to be involved, and the edit is where you construct everything you shot and bring the story on paper to the picture. My brother’s absence in the edit was completely an exercise in trusting my vision, trusting how I want to shape things, trusting my creative flair and vision while assembling a collaborative team that could help me achieve that.
We had an incredible editor from Mexico, Omar Castro Guzmán, who works with Lila Avilés a lot; he’s made work about grief, about different subjects, and he really held my feet to the fire, in terms of ideas and thematics, especially this idea of decay, of things rotting. We use fruit as an analogy: one side being fresh, the other side decaying. This idea of the “archive” in the film was not scripted, so we worked on it together, including the opening montage and the later one at the car, when things fall apart. We labored over the idea of a story not being linear; again, he held my feet to the fire about the story moving in circles, about piecing a puzzle together in the way we told it.
Our relationship was really based on the fundamentals of trust and of seeing exceptional talent in each other. I think my brother’s a genius, and I’ve heard him say as much about me; he’s a genius with words, and I’ve heard him say the same about me with pictures and images. Having that division of labor, mutual respect for artistic vision, and a distance that sometimes means stepping away is important and has allowed that relationship to continue to grow, hopefully into the next project and many more after that.
Wale also has a small role in “My Father’s Shadow.” He’s a prophet on a bridge, glimpsed sermonizing to passersby. Within his dialogue, there’s a sentiment I’d wanted to ask you about: “Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams.”
I love your attention to detail. That line is quite a prominent foreshadowing in the film. Obviously, in passing, people can miss it as the raving of this crazed bridge prophet. But in rehearsals, every time we would do a table read, up until we cast that role, he would read that line, and [our casting director] Shaheen Baig would tell him, “You really should act.” He’s a performer, so he’s quite good with being in front of a crowd, in front of audiences.
That line, for me, represents so much. Culturally, as Yoruba people, we don’t really believe in linear time. We believe we’re always in a spiral of communication—in the past, present, and future—with our ancestors, with those we haven’t met in the past, and in the future. Dreams play a big part in this. We bookmark the film with this idea: “I will see you in dreams.” For us, dreams are a portal to a part of our subconscious and a form of dialogue that we don’t understand as much as we used to, in times far gone. For Yoruba, tribal, and Indigenous people, those dreams do manifest.
Dreams come to you at different points in time, in terms of what you’re feeling. Our mother always used to tell us stories of dreams, of how the last time she saw my father was in a dream, and how he came and tried to absolve himself of dying. It’s always been a language, a shorthand, within our family, within our sense of heirlooms and the way we talk about things. The role of dreaming, specifically, is one of manifestation and prophecy; people can be more intuitive than they realize. They can certainly lean into frequencies that they’ve become disconnected from. What we were trying to do in the film is lead the audience via breadcrumbs into a subconscious way of thinking, a peripheral dialogue. It’s not in the characters, but it’s at the periphery of what’s going on. We were always submissive to the film’s themes.
I don’t know what the development process is like in other countries, but here in the U.K., developing a Nigerian film with U.K. funding is not easy. Even within that construction, there’s a lot of having to account for every line and every frame, so everything is by design. In the film, everything is intentional. There’s not a single moment in the film that isn’t constructed with the thematics of the film at play. We trimmed all the fat. It’s this word everyone used to say to me: there’s no self-indulgence in the film. It’s completely to the bone.
As a director, I also have to prove to the critics, during our dialogues, that I do understand and own this material. Attention to detail is something we were studious about. We’re not, we’re not putting someone. Someone on Letterboxd wrote that they hate long, lingering shots in art films, saying they thought there were some in our film until they reached the end and realized they all served a purpose. That’s literally what we were trying to communicate: everything, at every point in life, no matter how throwaway a moment might seem, is part of this genetic DNA imposing something on your psyche as a human being, on your nervous system — and, equally, is something we as people try to mirror in film.
Which is fascinating to me, the diligence of that construction, given that the thematics of “My Father’s Shadow” have much to do with this ephemeral, subconscious sensation. In your personal experience of dreaming, do you find that you awaken to recall exactly what you had dreamed about, or does it register more as these flickers of emotion and image? I am curious how consciously you go about translating that feeling into film.
Fantastic question: I know so many people who dream and remember their dreams so vividly, and they’re able to translate that into the images they create, but I can’t do that. I’m what I’ve learned to describe as being a lucid dreamer; within my dreams, there is an aspect of control. I can’t control exactly how the dream is going to shape up, but when I’m conscious of being in a dream, I have a little bit of agency regarding what I do in a dream. Sometimes, I might wake up saying something or flailing about as if I’m falling; my partner is like, “What’s going on?” [laughs] But the only time that’s happened is if I dream about someone specifically. I have a recurring pattern whereby, every once in a while, I’ll dream of someone, and it will be so vivid; within the dream, there’s an aspect of me comforting that person. What I tend to do is I message that person and tell them, “I hope this isn’t weird, but I dreamt of you, and I don’t know what was happening, but we shared a hug or a handshake or an embrace. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’re okay.”
Some people are completely freaked out by that, and some people have been like, “Please don’t message me again.” But some have been very receptive. In fact, I was just in Milan, screening the film, and saw a friend of mine. The last time I’d dreamt of her, I was in Canada, in Squamish, which was the last place her family went on holiday before her father died. There was a connection; even when I met her last week, and we were reminding each other of that, it felt like there was such a frequency. And there always can be, if you allow that frequency to comfort you in terms of conversation and knowledge. I wish I could put more of it in my films. I’m only one first film deep, so I’m in my infancy; I hope it’s a language that develops authentically in my work.
“My Father’s Shadow” revisits the Lagos of your childhood. What was important to you in depicting this point in Nigerian history, capturing these details of the time and place as it had existed, and presenting that as you do in this film through the eyes of children?
For so many of us, this was our debut feature: mine, my production designers [Jennifer and Pablo Anti,] two-thirds of our lead actors, our cinematographer [Jermaine Edwards,] and one of our composers, [Duval Timothy.] The production designers have a history of working on music videos.
There were no places to rent from in 1993, so we had to work closely with locations to find parts of Lagos that were somewhat untouched. I won’t say derelict, because I don’t necessarily think it’s important to castigate places; they’re untouched, because they’re located away from where the city is happening, where the populace lives, where industry is bustling. They’re off the beaten track. Seeing Lagos in that way was what I remember. My experience growing up in Lagos was in a single-parent household, going on side quests with my mum. Sometimes we went off the beaten track. I was forced to wait in hospital rooms while she was at the doctor’s, or in the car while she went to do something, or in a lounge when she was speaking to her friends. I was left to entertain myself off the beaten track, in old-school ’90s Lagos, which is not the sprawling, party-centric metropolis that people believe it to be now.
Looking for that took intention, because we couldn’t shoot in areas that no longer existed. Growing up in Lagos, we used to go to the beach on Christmas Day, but now there are hardly any beaches in Lagos open to the public. You have to get a boat to an island where you can go to the beach, and even that is a privilege for some and not everyone. We had to really go looking for Lagos.
I think the kids enjoyed it and felt safe. If they were in sprawling Lagos, it might have been much more frenetic for them, and we might not have had as much time. There was a lot of intentionally allowing them to be themselves, to play, to explore, and being very intentional with where we were going to put the camera and how they were going to be with their acting coaches. It was about this idea of play, finding locations that were dynamic and had the range for us to shoot it from one direction, then turn around and shoot it from another, making it feel completely different.
Because of my background as a self-taught filmmaker. I’m into being economical, as well as intentional. I love to be as effective as possible, I think. But it wasn’t easy to depict Lagos; there’s such a bustling Central Business District—the CBD—where everything is happening, and other parts of the city are completely forgotten. Those parts of the city are relics of the olden times, and they’re great for filming a period piece. All of Lagos is great for filming, but it really helped to lean into places that people might feel ashamed of in their city. That was perfect, because that’s the Lagos I actually remember.
There’s so much to discuss about the sequences where the brothers swim with their father at the beach, and he opens up about his past. Fọlárìn reflects on the burdens and sacrifices of fatherhood and shares with his son the story of his late brother, Oloremi, whom he continued to see in dreams after his death. At one point, he articulates this idea that resonates throughout the whole film: “The memories that pain you when someone goes are the same ones that will comfort you later.” What can you tell me about approaching that scene and all that you needed it to express?
I love that you referenced this scene, because this was the most difficult scene to film, not for any reason that you might imagine it being, though it was overtly emotional. Shooting in Lagos could be very tough, and the area we chose was a popular holiday destination. The crew felt they were on holiday and were having too much fun, I’d say, so I was trying to remind them that we were still working at this moment. [laughs]
That particular sequence had so many things happening at the same time. The boys weren’t particularly good swimmers. We had planned to shoot that whole sequence in the water, so what we salvaged from the water is what you see in the film, but that’s why we decided to lean into this idea of memory. Was it in the water? Was it on land? How is memory interpreted on both sides? The performances we got from the boys in the water were really stiff, apart from when they were playing in the shallows; my producer was like, “Let’s just shoot it on the beach, so we have it in the coverage.” But on the beach, we got more earnest performances, because we were really close to the boys.
I was a bit worried that we weren’t getting the performances we really needed, but I think trust in a community of collaborators helped me see things differently when I was unsure about what we were doing. The beach sequence is a confluence of luck, intention, and commitment on everyone’s part to get it done. I certainly don’t think, when we were shooting there, that I thought it was going to be the most profound scene. I was just trying to get through it because it was a long day. But it translated and feels more intuitive; it’s probably the most intuitive scene, because we had very little time. We were like, “Let’s just go. This feels right. Let’s shoot it.” If we had the time, that scene might have been constructed differently.
The camera being close to people’s faces is intentional because it helps you feel completely alive in the moment, up against the characters, and confronting them. We shot at a slight angle, so it wasn’t frontal, which I think softened it a bit. I have to give Jermaine Edwards, my cinematographer, a lot of praise. I have to give production design, our actors, and their coaches a lot of praise. Everything just came together for those moments.
You shot on Super 16, which adds this specific kind of texture and pacing to the image. I can’t imagine it was easy getting film in and out of Lagos. Was that Jermaine’s cross to bear?
No, that was the producers’ cross to bear—a very big cross to bear. So much strategy went into that, I have to say. I mean, I’m not privy to all the information, because good producers try to limit your involvement and allow you to focus more creatively. But I know it was a logistical feat to get the rushes out, not strike sets, view the rushes, determine whether we got everything we needed, strike those sets two weeks later, and go through the process again and again. It was really complicated, and it’s a testament to how committed the whole team was in every aspect of delivering this story.
“My Father’s Shadow” opens in U.S. theaters Feb. 13, via MUBI.