How My Father’s Shadow Reinvents The Ghost Story

“Dear father, I will see you in dreams.”

The opening words of My Father’s Shadow, spoken by one of its young protagonists, feel almost innocuous at its outset. The film has been touted as an Africa-set complement to a bittersweet coming-of-age drama like Aftersun, and on one level, that’s true. It follows a day in the life of two young brothers as they’re whisked from their home in the Nigerian backcountry and into the bustling city of Lagos, where they reconnect with their father Fọlárìn (an immaculate Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù). But it doesn’t take long for My Father’s Shadow to evolve into something almost metaphysical. To some, it’s a ghost story; to others, an Afrofuturist fable. But for director Akinola Davies Jr. and his brother and co-writer Wale Davies, it’s a way of communing with the father they never got to know.

“[Wale] has always idolized our father, whereas I’m the opposite,” Davies tells Inverse ahead of the film’s theatrical release. “I was angry with my father for dying, even though he died of natural causes.”

“You’re unsure of where this took place and that speaks to the memory of a child.”

My Father’s Shadow offered both an outlet to interrogate those conflicting emotions, and to confront ideas of strong, silent masculinity that’d persisted through generations. “I wanted to ground it the conversations we never had, in the conversations we’d like to have for the women in our lives,” Davies continues. “What we tried to investigate was our masculinity within Fọlá’s role, within Ṣọpẹ́’s performances, within our lives, and within the masculinities we saw performed when we were kids.”

The conversations between Fọlá and his sons might be imagined, but they ache with the kind of specificity that hits like a punch in the gut. Davies grounds the personal with a haunting real-life history, turning My Father’s Shadow into a rare beast of a debut. It defies characterization in the best of ways, leaning less on explanation than raw intuition to deliver one of the most assured and devastating films of the decade.

It’s hard to shake the fact that My Father’s Shadow is a partially fictional account Davies’ life. He and his brother have few memories of their father, who died from epilepsy when the pair were young — but the vacuum he left in his wake has haunted their steps all the same. The spark for Davies’ debut feature came from an exercise that Wale picked up after watching an episode of Oprah, where guests were charged to write a letter to a deceased family member.

“From that prompt on Oprah, he basically tried to write a letter to our father multiple times,” Davies says, “and he’d break down crying every time.”

But he did eventually succeed in penning a screenplay on that same idea, which he later sent to Davies “completely unprompted.” After collaborating on the acclaimed short film Lizard, Davies reteamed with his brother to double down on his speculative story.

My Father’s Shadow is immersed in Yoruba spirituality, which manifests chiefly in the importance of dreams. Dreams are a conduit to the subconscious, to ancestors, and even to the past and future. Time is nonlinear for Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo), Aki (Godwin Chimerie Egbo), and Fọlá, which complicates the concept of memory in the film. “Our Mexican editor, Omar Guzmán Castro, he held my feet to the fire about this idea of memory,” Davies explains. “You’re unsure of where this took place and that speaks to the memory of a child.”

There is a looseness in the film’s relationship with time, particularly in its opening moments. It effectively begins with Remi and Akin (Godwin Chimerie Egbo) stuck home alone, hopelessly bored and eager for company. Their father Fọlá appears soon after, and offers to take them to Lagos with him as he tries to collect six months of backpay. It’s the strangest kind of wish fulfillment, so timely it almost feels like a dream. That unreal quality haunts the film’s every step, with quick cuts explaining piecemeal that Fọlá is not long for this world.

My Father’s Shadow gives Remi and Akin what Davies and his brother never had: real closure. Fọlá shares fatherly wisdom about the double-edged sword of sacrifice in what feel like suppressed memories, while our brothers gain a fuller understanding of the man their father was. Tenderness and innocence dominate these quiet moments — but this ghost story wouldn’t be complete without a looming sense of dread.

“I’ve been describing it as a ‘supernatural drama,’ to borrow from how Mati Diop described Atlantics,” Davies says. “You’re dealing with a lot of shadow work [where] if you peek behind the curtain, something sinister is potentially formulating.”

You feel that the most in Davies’ depiction of Lagos. My Father’s Shadow is a bittersweet love letter to the city where he spent the bulk of his childhood, reflecting its charm and its dangers in equal measure. “A lot of portrayals of Lagos are things that I can’t recognize,” Davies admits. “The Lagos you see is the Lagos we grew up in, which [matches] the pace and the fury of the city at any given point in time.”

“If you peek behind the curtain, something sinister is potentially formulating.”

The film is set on the cusp of Nigeria’s 1993 election crisis, culminating in the divisive election between MKO Abiola and the military dictator Ibrahim Babangida, who annulled the election results and triggered a series of violent protests in the aftermath. The idea of political corruption and its capacity to destroy is reflected in images of rotting fruit and bodies of decomposing animals. Even allusions to Fọlá’s impending death, rendered through ominous close-ups of nosebleeds, clue us into how fleeting and precarious this life is. “That’s the idea we put into every frame: here is the beautiful side and here is the decomposition happening right underneath your nose,” Davies says.

Davies was appropriately uncompromising in conveying his vision, and he had to be. My Father’s Shadow was shot on 16mm on location in Lagos, a difficult feat when filming with two young actors. It all came together under an exacting schedule, but happy accidents made room for “serendipitous moments that could almost ruin a scene,” which Davies admittedly loves. Some sequences — like a heartfelt beachside confrontation between Fọlá and Remi, which feels almost like an extended tribute to Moonlight — had to be reworked to accommodate their tight schedule, and are better for it. Strong visuals and themes were crucial for the filmmakers, most of whom were used to being underestimated.

“I had to really prove that all the decisions in this film are not by chance, they’re by design,” Davies explains. “As a Black filmmaker in Europe, you get scrutinized on every decision you make… A lot of what I used to get in the early edits is like, ‘Oh, it really reminds us of Perfect Days by Wim Wenders. But Wim Wenders is a really established director. You’re going to have to earn the right to make a film like that.’”

My Father’s Shadow has since earned Davies some bragging rights: It was the first Nigerian film to be invited to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, premiering in Un Certain Regard and taking home the Special Mention for the Camera D’Or prize. That acclaim has “exceeded” Davies’ expectations, “but I think it makes me want to fight harder, because so often — for right or wrong reasons — African films in this global space, there’s not many of us who get to author our own stories.”

Africa is a continent, after all, with experiences as varied and specific as the colors of a kaleidoscope. But filmmakers are still fighting against the idea that African culture is monolithic. My Father’s Shadow might have fulfilled one dream for Davies, but his next involves challenging that notion on a bigger scale.

My Father’s Shadow is now playing in theaters.