In Akinola Davies Jr.’s striking debut feature, My Father’s Shadow, the past haunts every image. Set amid the political turmoil of Nigeria’s aborted democratic election of 1993, the film treats history not as a distant event, but as a persistent presence that finds its way into the emotional fabric of the relationship between a father and his two sons.

The two brothers Akinola (Godwin Egbo) and Olaremi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) play in front of an isolated house in a languid village outside Lagos when a gust of wind announces the appearance of their long-absent father Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù). On a whim, he takes the boys with him to Lagos, where he intends to collect his outstanding wages for the past few months. Travelling from the calmness of the village, the boys marvel at the textures, smells, and colours of the bustling capital as their father shows them around while waiting for his boss to arrive.

“Lagos is a living vibrant organism that refuses to be stilled by history”

However, the day in Lagos with their idolised father increasingly turns nightmarish. Folarin repeatedly suffers nosebleeds, while battalions of soldiers ominously gaze at the camera with beady, bloodshot eyes. The sense of impending dread is heightened by the use of slow-motion and eerily muted sound. Through the children’s eyes, we catch glimpses of what is unfolding around them: newspapers reveal a massacre committed against political activists at Bonny Camp, one of the many acts of repression that marked the election crisis. Restlessness turns to riot as military leader Ibrahim Babangida announces on June 24th the annulment of the democratic election. It becomes increasingly obvious that Folarin himself fell prey to the government’s authoritarian violence and now lives on only in his sons’ imagination, less a living presence than a figure sustained by his sons’ longing.

The imagery of My Father’s Shadow fluidly presents the film’s meditation on presence and absence by oscillating between static shots of decay and cultural vitality. Throughout, the camera lingers on empty spaces: on a dusty room imprinted by long shadows, on birds circling high in the sky, on rotten apples, on an immobile, rusty car. Specific details, like the recurrent images of ants crawling through the cracks of a wall, suddenly become of utmost importance, slowing down the pace of the film into a state of oneiric stasis. However, these shots are powerfully contrasted to the scenes of child-like wonder in and around Lagos. In these sequences the camera has a handheld feel to it, conveying the trance-like state of the children taking in the restless energy of the capital. Movement between these disparate scenes at once presents Lagos as a city tied down by the weight of political uncertainty and violence, but also as a living vibrant organism that refuses to be stilled by history.

Meta-filmic techniques are cleverly deployed to consciously make the audience aware that Akinola Davies Jr.’s story is not a passive rendition of the past, but a reflection on the fragmented nature of recollection and historical experience. A hectic montage at the beginning of the film – reminiscent of the first scenes of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona – weaves together clips from newsreels and archives about the 1993 election. These vignettes are superimposed over the boys’ longing utterances for their father, highlighting the parallel between political and familial rupture. Occasional transitions resembling the splices of analogue film stock serve to further remind the viewer of the film’s physical medium. In this way, My Father’s Shadow foregrounds its own processes of construction, presenting collective experience not as something transparently accessed but as something assembled from fragments, textures, and traces. Cinema reveals itself as a reconstructive practice, exposing how images shape memory.

“The memories that cause you pain when someone leaves are the same ones that will comfort you later”

Beyond cinematographic style, the dialogue helps to embed the film’s engagement with the effects of absence within the intimate register of lived experience. At one point, Folarin says to his sons: “The memories that cause you pain when someone leaves are the same ones that will comfort you later.” By filtering national trauma through the fragile perception of children, Davies Jr. shows how remembrance is an act that can simultaneously haunt and liberate us. Yet he also resists any simple consolatory resolution, presenting remembrance not only as a source of solace but as a difficult and fraught mode of living. At a key scene at the beach, Folarin recounts to his older son how his own life was marred by loss, both by his brother’s early death, which has been haunting him in his dreams, and his father’s neglect – a situation he tragically mirrors with his own non-presence due to his work in the city. Folarin poignantly notes that “Nigeria is hard,” outlining the cost of survival within a state of political and economic precarity that presents the possibility of resistance as an increasingly quixotic dream.

My Father’s Shadow examines the way both individual and collective memory hold a grip on a Nigerian family and its people. However, its strength lies in the fact that its tender interplay of history, political unrest, and familial yearning does not collapse into each other. Davies Jr. avoids the trappings of either positioning his protagonist as a simple allegory of the historical fate of Nigeria, or of using the historical setting as a mere backdrop for a conventional story of love and loss. In doing so, the film quietly suggests that the past it evokes is not past at all, but part of an unfinished political and emotional present that still shapes Nigeria today.