
Telling an authentic, politically charged story from a child’s perspective can be a challenge. For tales set during a period like WWII, a lifelong combination of school lessons and pop culture ensures an instant familiarity for audiences, allowing films to be less forthcoming with expository context and feel more lived-in for lacking any soundbites discussing whatever Hitler was up to at that specific moment. Naturally, the school history syllabus across the western world only goes so far––I could count the number of non-WWII topics covered throughout my five years of British high school history on one hand––so filmmakers rarely get the chance to tell a coming-of-age story at a time of political turmoil without also having to treat their audience like their young protagonists. Set following the 1993 Nigerian Presidential election––when votes were still being counted and millions were naively optimistic for a democratic handover in government from an authoritarian leader who had very recently ordered the army to kill scores of protesters––Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow ceases to feel authentic every time it has to pause and contextualize the fraught political context to its audience. It would be the number-one topic of conversation at this moment, yet every time it comes up, it’s discussed like the people speaking about it are being filled in for the first time.
It’s the single biggest distraction in an otherwise lovely tale of two brothers bonding with their distant, enigmatic father on a trip from their rural village to the city of Lagos, clunkily and frequently explaining the context to the audience even though the two young protagonists are rarely learning about it alongside us. It always feels like a lack of courage or conviction from the first-time feature director, who wants us to outsmart his two leads with knowledge they only partially have––a vague awareness that something isn’t right in the country surrounding the election, but too naive to define the specifics. It would have been a more authentic entry point into the story, but the spoonfeeding of exposition throughout can feel like a betrayal of trust in the audience. It’s especially jarring when the emotions Shadow stirs in its strongest moments aren’t reliant on viewers understanding the country’s political situation at all. The story may be inextricably tied to the election, but the theme of fatherly sacrifice would resonate strongly even if you only had a child’s perspective on the turmoil engulfing the nation.
Real-life brothers Godwin Chiemerie and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo play the young siblings Akin and Remi, often left to their own devices when their father is always away for work and mother far too busy running the household to spend much time with them. One morning, their dad Fola (Gangs of London star Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) briefly shows up, and after protesting that he never spends time with them, agrees to take them on a day trip to Lagos, where he needs to collect money owed from a security guard shift and try securing some more hours––the process of getting to the big city from their village, however, isn’t a straightforward one. Not enough that the bus is many miles away; national fuel shortages due to an economic crash mean they don’t even get the whole way there, and when they do, they’re more exposed to Fola’s desperation to get paid, even though the whole country appears to be collapsing around them.
The tension that drives Dìrísù’s stellar performance is his need to be seen as a positive role model, desperate to overcompensate for extensive absences by children who know very little about his day-to-day life, and understand even less. The film is at its best when foregrounding that relationship and leaving societal breakdown on the peripheries, creeping into view only from the sight of protesters on the beaches or complete absence of other children at a theme park; the economy is in the toilet and the population are on high alert under the assumption a coup will happen, but this never feels more eerie than when it, sans words, creeps into a traditional drama about a family bonding. Children growing to understand their parents’ perspectives for the first time is a coming-of-age trope, but Davies Jr. handles this aspect subtly and elegantly. When their father fills them in on how he met their mother for the first time, a story they’d never been told, it’s a masterful moment in staging two children realizing their parents have interior lives and an entire life before them. These underplayed exchanges are the driving engine of the movie.
As heavy-handed as it is in its invocation, the political is inextricable from the personal for Fola, his support for the social democratic candidate M.K.O Abiola––whose landslide win was annulled by the incumbent, citing widespread electoral fraud in every region of the country––appearing to be purely motivated through an urgent, earnest need to provide for his family. He is allowed to be viewed entirely through his children’s eyes in a way the wider backdrop isn’t, and so their gradual understanding of his selflessness is largely uncompromised, with inferences that he’s having an affair in the city not properly registering from their naive perspectives. Fola’s few complications––most notably the extent of his anti-government activism which is slowly teased throughout––are devised in a way so as to not cloud over the simple, agreeable nature of his sacrifices and hard-earned life lessons he dishes out to the brothers as he softens up in their company. It’s to Dìrísù’s credit that his character feels richer than is written, that he’s hiding far more secrets from the brothers out of a lingering sense of guilt for being so distant from them out of necessity. Again, it’s a fully-realized performance which doesn’t need to rely on frequent exposition dumps to aid it; the family drama could be transplanted to a more neutral political backdrop and still have the same resonance.
These are natural flaws for a first-time feature filmmaker, with Davies Jr. not fully trusting his instincts when it comes to maintaining the points of view from his protagonists, revealing too much about the harshness of this world while Dìrísù’s character is less forthcoming about his place in it. I don’t doubt that his next film will be bolder, more lived-in, more ambitious with what he asks of his audience––his debut often feels like it’s playing things a little too safe to achieve wider resonance, living in the shadow of its potential as a result.
My Father’s Shadow screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival and will be released by MUBI on February 6, 2026, following a 2025 awards-qualifying run.
The post BFI London Review: My Father’s Shadow is a Lovely Tale of Familial Bonding That Plays Things Safe first appeared on The Film Stage.