by Nick Taylor
The Gotham Awards ceremony is tomorrow night, and to celebrate I'll be devoting the next 24 hours and change to the nominees of the Breakthrough Director category. I've already gone long on Familiar Touch, the only nominee represented here and in the Best Feature lineup. Double dipping has historically led to winning the Breakthrough Director category, so we might give Sarah Friedland some pre-emptive congrats if we felt inclined to run stats. I'll reveal my own favorite after I've posted my final review, but suffice it to say that all five films would be worthy winners. So to start, let's dive into Akinola Davies Jr. and My Father's Shadow...
Absolutely the boldest bitch in the room. Davies, who co-wrote the script with his brother Wale, achieves an unusually clear-eyed fusion of a child’s life-shaping encounters and an adult’s more mature recollections. My Father’s Shadow becomes mythic in stature, and though the swings he takes aren’t always successful, the sheer ambition of Davies’s artistic strategies and his expanding political and personal scopes are astonishing. The film has been selected as the United Kingdom’s International Film submission, which hopefully means it will get a larger audience over the next few months.
My Father’s Shadow takes place in 1993 Nigeria, following a young Aki and Wale (played by brothers Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) as they join their estranged father Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) on a trip to Lagos for work. Dad isn’t home a lot because of his job, so even though the boys are upset about leaving home without their mother knowing where they are, they’re so excited to learn what their father does in the world. This journey coincides with the upcoming announcement of the 12 June 1993 Presidential election results, the first civilian election in ten years after the military government took over. Much of Nigeria is impatient for change, and Folarin takes part in many conversations, arguments, and impromptu celebrations about how M.K.O. Abiola and the SDP will improve the country.
These declarations of hope punctuate a national mood primarily defined by impoverished material conditions and military vans prowling the streets like predatory animals. The public bus Folarin and his sons take to Lagos runs out of gas, forcing them to hitchhike multiple times. Folarin repeatedly stops at his job to collect six months of unpaid wages, only to be told his supervisor will be back later - no, even later than that, if he comes back at all. During these travels, the boys get to see how their father behaves in the world. They meet friends and coworkers who share their impressions of Folarian to Aki and Wale. Yet the more they’re told about him, the more they realize how much their father remains elusive to them, even when he shares more of himself than we suspect he has in a long time during a surprise trip to the beach.
My Father’s Shadow quickly cemented itself in my brain alongside 20th Century Woman or Aftersun as an aesthetically florid, politically cogent exhumation of a beloved, unknowable parent. Both of those films strike me as more fully-realized, yet the comparison also highlights how Davies goes pound-for-pound with muscular, confident risks in scope and style. Occasionally he lays on so many flourishes they become gratuitous, especially when they’re used to remind the audience they’re watching a memory play. Distortions in the sound mix, laying on film grain, sudden scene transitions and fragmentations of the image - these devices have the necessary impact Davies desires, but they work against the film as a whole by distancing us from it.
It’s unfortunate, especially since setting these moments aside, My Father’s Shadow appears more confident as it goes in trusting its audience to meet Davies at this intersection of myth and reality. Jermaine Edwards’ cinematography films Nigeria and its citizens with such color and tactility, ensuring these entities attain mythic stature through camera placement without becoming detached from reality. The base coat of burnished photography, a sound mix vibrantly connected to off-screen hubbub, and observant editing patterns smartly remind us of the children’s POV without abstracting them. The memories being presented here feel alive, and you can sense Aki and Wale are still grappling with who their father was. Sometimes Davies' script and direction fail to properly balance the mixture of identification and opacity that defines this story - I think the last scene is symptomatic of this, emphasizing a mournful tone that's been present throughout - but his instincts are always guided by genuinely feeling. Even when one of Davies' decision doesn't work for me, his goals are always legible.
When it comes to planting one foot in a child’s memories and another in an adult’s complex truths, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù’s expertly calibrated performance is arguably the best asset My Father’s Shadow has in forwarding and sustaining this approach. We have to understand him as a child’s recollection of a beloved but difficult parent, even as the character’s morality, material needs, and desires reveal themselves to the audience and his children in ways they don’t fully understand. Yet, Dìrísù never loses who this man is. He’s able to meet Davies Jr.’s cinematic grammars halfway, working in sync with his ambitious director to provide the myth scale of withholding and intimacy needed to make this gamble pay off. Mostly, he does, and Davies Jr. is similarly successful across his entire ensemble. I’d have loved for Godwin and Chibuike Egbo to somehow get a joint Breakthrough Performer nomination. You can see them watching their dad, trying their hardest to pin him down without always understanding this towering figure.
I’m looking forward to a second viewing of My Father’s Shadow to see if the choices I’m less excited about translate better now that I know what’s coming. As for right now, I remain deeply impressed by Davies’s risks with montage, sound, imagery, and scale, capturing the very start of Nigeria’s freefall as potently as he evokes his own relationships with his father and brother.
My Father's Shadow is currently scheduled for a US theatrical release on February 2026.