Akinola Davies Jr. initially declined BBC Film head Eva Yates’ suggestion that he make a feature film. Instead, he shot the 18-minute Lizard, which won the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Grand Jury Prize.
However, Yates got her wish eventually, and the result is My Father’s Shadow — Davies’ feature directorial debut that is premiering at Cannes in Un Certain Regard. Davies co-wrote the film with his brother Wale Davies, who came up with the story before they collaborated on Lizard.
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Shot in Lagos, Nigeria, it stars stage and screen actor Sopé Dìrísù as a dad who takes his two young sons into the bustling metropolis as unrest erupts over the country’s controversial June 12th, 1993 presidential election.
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Davies started out as a runner, then self-financed music videos for others, before attending the New York Film Academy and shooting commercials and music videos. He realized that if he were to make a film it would be about something that has “a sense of urgency” for him.
He read the My Father’s Shadow script his brother had sent him and was moved to tears. “I’d never really conceived of the idea of spending a day with my father… for someone I am named after and never got to know.” Davies was 20 months old when his father died.
In working on the script together — with Davies in London and his older brother in Lagos — “It took a while for us to process a lot of our intentions of what we’re trying to do,” says Davies, “because obviously it’s kind of semi-biographical, but also not. So, it’s really trying to decide, where are we borrowing from?” They asked, what was real, and what was fiction? ”We were leaning on memory,” Davies says. “We also did an extensive amount of research, more so about the politics of the time. We were really young during the events of 1993.”
His brother Wale notes that the election serves as more than a backdrop. “It was speaking to a lot of unresolved questions around fatherhood and also nationhood,” he says, adding that the film reflects “the actual Lagos I’ve seen just looking outside my window. Every day is a film to me.”
Nodding, Davies notes, “There’s really good storytelling in Nigeria. There’s a global sense of how we’re trying to position African stories.”
My Father’s Shadow is presented by BBC Film and the BFI in association with the Match Factory, Fremantle, Electric Theatre Collective and Mubi. It is also an Element Pictures production and is in association with Crybaby and Fatherland Productions.
Davies and Wale are much younger than their two older siblings who, Davies says, “had a relationship with our dad, but me and Wale kind of didn’t. So, we kind of had the same family, but we’ve had different upbringings effectively… Our father passed away. He developed epilepsy, and it kind of took his life, unfortunately. So we grew up with our mother and we grew up with our grandmothers.” Their paternal and maternal grandfathers passed “so we literally grew up with the women in our family. We grew up with my mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, my sister, my cousins. As far as I’m aware, my family’s predominantly, maybe it was patriarchal, but it’s definitely matriarchal by circumstance, basically.”
The two brothers formed a bond as children that has continued in adulthood even though Davies has lived and worked predominantly in London while Wale has resided in Lagos.
Having collaborated on Lizard they formulated a system, Davies explains, “because we have professional lives that we adhere to. So, we would go away for a period of time just together, and then we would just work on the material. We would spend a few days watching references and discussing ideas and concepts and themes and things we watched, and in the references, we enjoyed what we liked about them, what we didn’t.”
Wale would spend the back half of those trips writing while Davies would act as a sounding board, leaving the lion’s share of the writing down to Wale who examined “the idea that your nation is meant to sort of take care of the citizens as well. And so mirroring that for me, obviously losing for both of us, but losing a father at age 5, I kind of had some formative ideas about him and memories, and I think it was exploring those memories and exploring whether some of the memories I have are exactly the same memories that Akinola has as well. So, it’s just exploring whether we actually have those memories or were we told this by our mom and we just co-opted it as a memory and we’re sharing it together because he was two years old, so would you remember the exact same detail that I would have?”
Wale was age 11 during the June 1993 election and he remembers “everybody being super excited by the idea of this guy Chief MKO Abiola becoming the president.”
Chief Abiola was the charismatic business magnate and a leader of the Egba clan. “He had football clubs and was very involved in sports. I was a huge soccer fan, so I’d always read about him. He was a larger-than-life figure, and I knew some of his kids as well. So, it was just this idea of this guy taking part in everything. I just remember my mom being so excited, always hopeful that this is the moment, it’s finally going to change and everything is going to be different.”
The excitement around that time was palpable, says Wale. “Everybody was thinking, ‘OK, we’re coming out military rule, we have this generous guy who’s now finally about to be president, and things are finally about to take off.’ And I think with Nigeria, it’s the promise and the potential that kills you, you keep hoping for it. And now I’m 42, and I think even in that time we’ve lost so many people who’ve never seen this promise materialize. So, it was also speaking to some of that and trying to find ways to put some of that in there.”
The two brothers spoke to several people, many of whom were at university in 1993 and who were, as Wale puts it “on the front line” and they were able to offer the filmmakers a lot of context.
The film, Wale notes, “was mirroring this idea of fatherhood and what it means in a Black or African or specifically Nigerian context where you feel you have to go out and earn and you have to go out and make a livelihood, but what do you trade off with that time spent intentionality? So yeah, so just exploring a lot of those themes and narrowing that with Nigeria, and I’m sure a story for a lot of African countries as to this change. We see it there, and if only we just have the right configuration of people who want to change things, but somehow that always evades us.”
My Father’s Shadow is set on the day that military forces annulled the election result and what’s so powerful — and moving — is that it captures what could be called, the death of a dream, in both personal and political terms.
For Wale, the situation “was a new low in terms of politics here where you can actually win an election, but we’re just not going to give it to you. We’re just not going to accept your voices or accept your votes. And I think that’s where I feel even something was broken fundamentally in the relationship between government and people, because now all bets are off.
“And so, we set it on that day of the annulment where some people are still hopeful, some people thought the votes were coming in at the time, and it was clear that one person was winning, and then suddenly there’s this big annulment. So, it’s on the backdrop of that particular day.”
The political upheaval happens as the father takes the two boys on a day trip to Lagos.
Davies says that “it is kind of like they’ve never done it before. On this day trip, they’re all feeling each other out. He is figuring out what to do with them, they’re figuring out how to engage with him, and they sort of witness the kind of ups and downs and tribulations of what he has to navigate on a day to day. And then he ends up spending time, they question his absence and stuff like that.”
And then there’s a sort of Nigerian-Greek vibe where the father has to go into protective instinct to get his sons home and in so doing “assuming this position of power and masculinity,” Davies says, while at the same time the relationship between the three is “very meditative and very gentle and tender.”
The film is a giant step for a picture coming out of Nigeria and landing at the world’s most important film festival.
Many have a low opinion of Nollywood films but this one stands tall against those.
Davies argues, while not speaking for Wale, “that I feel like there’s really good storytelling in Nigeria, and there’s a really good arm of art house films, everything between black and white I think there is sort of sensitivity in these films of how the sort of stories we’re telling. And I think the Nigerian, and maybe I’m not an authority to speak on this, but a lot of Nigerian films are predominantly more commercial for a Nigerian audience… There’s a global sense of how we’re trying to position African stories. There are still similar stories, but just the manner in which we’re telling them is a little bit different to what may be the norm.”
Wale’s own take is based on two things. “One, I think Nollywood really just started with people who just got cameras and said, ‘Let’s just make something.’ And it started with this home video kind of approach. I remember once we had an uncle who lived with us, my mum’s brother, and he even shot a Nollywood film in our house where we were growing up… and I think over time it’s evolved, but I think what I think has been lost with this evolution is a lot of people have then looked to the West and try to transplant those same ideas back home.”
As Wale notes earlier, he’s disappointed that he doesn’t see “that many things that reflect the actual Lagos I live in. Just looking outside of my window every day is a film to me. And none of that is ever reflected. I see characters I don’t recognize. I see detectives trying to solve a case and just things that I have never seen in the reality of Nigeria. So, it’s then how do you first of all reflect Nigeria in a way that is very real to what I’m seeing.
“And then secondly, and I think this is more than a Nigerian problem, I think it’s an African problem. The way Africans and the way people are portrayed from over here is I just don’t see characters with a lot of nuance. And I think that it’s important to write characters with nuance. One of the things that fascinates me is that there’s so many amazing writers I’m reading right now who are from Nigeria, but none of them have ever pointed that weapon to a screen because they’ve never really seen the incentive to do so. So hopefully with films like this, maybe some people would start to use their writing prowess for film and see that there’s a pathway toward doing that.
It must mean something that BBC Film, the BFI, Mubi, Elemental, Match Factory and Potboiler Productions are all over My Father’s Shadow. But Nigerian film producers must not be just an adjunct to London and Hollywood. The stories have to be about, again as Wale says, what he can see outside his window in Lagos and beyond.
Wale nods and says, “Yes, 100%.”
Davies says that he and Wale had “been laying the groundwork inadvertently for almost a decade. “Wale was like my first ever producer in Nigeria when I was trying to shoot a bunch of crazy ideas in the north and different parts of the country. We went to the east to shoot some stuff. We went to north to shoot some stuff. I think that was the impetus for Wale to start Fatherland Productions.
“Having shot in Nigeria over a period of time, I felt pretty confident that it’s something that we could do,” Davies says. “I shot a project there on 35MM. It wasn’t easy to shoot, but even then, we knew we could potentially shoot on film because My Father’s Shadow is shot on 16. There’re loads of technicians in Nigeria. They might not have had infinite resources and structure and how they worked, but Nollywood as an industry has a mass of excellent technicians. And I think similar to what Fatherland does and Element does, what we allowed ourselves to do with [producers] Rachel Dargavel, Funmbi Ogunbanwo and Wale, is just give a lot of those people structure and allow them to work within a structure that has a standard for allowing them to be the best version of what they do,” Davies says.
“And I think ultimately for me, sitting in Nigeria is like a no-brainer,” Davies adds.
“I would shoot in Nigeria nine out of 10 times because as a director, there’s just a certain amount of freedom that you get. Even, as Wale said, just looking out the windows, everything is cinematic. Everything I feel can be worthy to be a feature from the guy just selling bread to the guy riding around. Everyone’s day just on the most working class level is a movie basically or can be a movie depending on the way you see it. And then it can be so hectic and then you pull up at a stop and there’s traffic and you look out the window and the most magical scene is occurring. And I just feel like that’s Lagos in Nigeria in a nutshell. It’s so chaotic, but just magical at the same time.”
Concerning the casting for Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, sure, that was sort of magical too. Davies saw him at the Donmar Warehouse in London when Dìrísù. was in the play One Night in Miami. “And I remember seeing it and I was like, ‘Wow, I’d never seen a play with that level of skill and attrition from all these Black leads.’ The whole theater was spell bound and the energy in the room was just incredible.”
Davies also remembers seeing Remi Weekes film His House and was fascinated by Dìrísù’s performance, and that of Wunmi Mosaku’s. He later spotted Dìrísù in Gangs of London. “I started looking at more pictures with Ṣọpẹ́ and I remember sending it to Wale saying, ’This could be the guy.’ He holds the stature but is he a bit too ripped? When I was trying to learn how to direct actors for Lizard I watched Michael Caine do this course on how to direct between the screen and the stage. Caine was saying that the screen is all in the eyes, the camera can pick up all the little details, and Ṣọpẹ́ has that in spades.”
When the great casting director came on board for My Father’s Shadow, Dìrísù’s name was on top of the list.
They met for coffee and later the actor did a reading of the script and everyone involved knew they had their man.
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