My father's shadow could beat up your father's shadow
dir: Akinole Davies Jnr
2026
This film feels, and I feel sure, is meant to feel, less like a period piece and more like a shared memory. Admittedly, the thought of movies set in the 1990s as being period pieces is staggering to me, but I cannot ignore the march of time, no matter how much I wish I could. 1993 was many years ago. I remember (parts of) 1993 very well, but I didn’t have the experiences these two brothers did that they try to capture here, so hopefully their memories are better than mine.
Akinole Davies Jnr and his brother Wale are remembering a day they spent with their dad shortly before his death. Obviously, since 33 years have passed since then, and they might have been eleven and eight at the time, in scripting and directing this film, with child actors playing them and the talented Sope Dirisu playing their dad, it’s less about achieving historical accuracy and more about capturing the feeling of hanging out with a dad they lost too soon after these events. It’s a dream, a tightly held one, overflowing with sadness and a bit of joy, but mostly aching loss.
Folarin, their dad, is a complex character. He is not exactly a stern patriarch but he is pretty serious. He doesn’t fuck around. When he tells the brothers to get dressed to accompany him to the capital of Nigeria, being Lagos, they snap to it regardless of their misgivings.
We get the impression he is rarely around. They have a mother who works, but is absent this day. Folarin is usually away working, yet this itself is its own complication.
To get to the capital they try to catch a bus. Things are kind of messed up in Nigeria at this time. There’s been a military dictatorship for the last decade, there’s been a free and fair election recently, and everyone is on edge waiting for the results to be announced. How that results in a national fuel shortage is not entirely clear, but it’s so bad that the bus they’re travelling on conks out half-way to the capital, due to a lack of fuel. Some guy had been collecting money from everyone that was getting on, but he’s got nothing to say other than “the bus is out of fuel” when people start complaining.
How else to get the rest of the way? Taxis are too pricey, so Folarin asks a guy with a bike to take them some distance. Four people, two of them admittedly children, on one bike. Now that’s practically an ad for whatever company that bike was from.
The whole place seems to be on tenterhooks, and it doesn’t help that trucks filled with soldiers lurk around everyone glaring at people, or at least glaring at Folarin whenever they see him.
Are they glaring at him because he did something they didn’t approve of, or because he looks like trouble? That’s how it looked to these boys, at least; everyone else thought their dad was the bee’s knees, but the soldiers all saw him as a threat. I think it’s mostly because, being a military dictatorship, they saw everyone as a threat, but we are, after all, seeing how it felt for these boys, rather than necessarily how it actually was.
Folarin did something, had some involvement in the election, but it’s not entirely clear what he did. At the very least it’s clear that he totally and completely and utterly supported the chap everyone seems to have voted for, being MKO Abiola. The second Folarin loudly and proudly announces that MKO Abiola will make everything all right and bring necessary change to Nigeria and improve everyone’s lives I immediately got a sinking feeling.
Hope dies last, usually, but not even in this case. Anyway, that only forms the background, the basis for what we’re seeing in the people surrounding the three main characters. The boys are too young to care about politics. They still fight over who gets a bigger serving of food or whether the Ultimate Warrior, the Undertaker or Kamala the Ugandan Giant is the best WWE wrestler (hint: they were all terrible wrestlers).
The journey to Lagos takes forever, most of the film, because for whatever reason, Folarin and his lovely wife chose to bring up their sons in a village rather than in the city. Does that sound credible to you? It reminded me of another flick I saw recently where a man chose to leave his family in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and live and work in London in order to never have his family life interrupt his city life. Completely different timeframes and completely different cultures, but this is more about something the brothers may have realised years later rather than at the time, which seems like it played its part.
They eventually get to a building where Folarin has recently worked, and hasn’t been paid in months. The friend he finds there is all hugs and kind words, and chocolates for the boys, but he keeps making excuses for the ever-not-present manager who isn’t there that could give Folarin his back pay, his dues, his moneys owed. It represents a wonderful double-bind that comes up in an argument later on between father and son about how his absences make their mum sad, so very sad. And of course the heroic, the respected, the powerful Folarin, who is generally called “Kapo” in Yoruba (one of the languages spoken in Nigeria) by all who see him as a term of respect, can’t justify his absences to his sons if the justification for being away is earning the money to support them.
This is a father who is trying to impart something of himself to his sons, to encourage them to look out for each other and grow up to be honourable men, and thankfully he is, for all his stern looks and bluster, gentle with them. I sometimes dread films like this about fathers and sons, because there are so many examples of horrible toxic fathers trying to impart nothing but brutality to their poor sons in art and movies, and my heart breaks to see it.
There’s a part of an August Wilson play, which has thankfully been transformed into filmic form, being Fences. I won’t bore you with the plot or the whatever elses, but there’s a sequence that I’ve seen a million times, whether it’s James Earl Jones in an earlier theatrical version or Denzel Washington in 2016, screaming at his son after his son asks “why don’t you like me?”
“Like you? What law is there say I got to like you?” It goes on and on, but mostly it’s a jerk saying “I don’t need to be gentle or loving with you because I’m an arsehole, and I provide for you, and anything else is beyond my capacity as a stunted human being, because I’m a rotten person brought up by a rotten father and I want you to be rotten and horrible too.”
It is one of the most toxic approaches to fatherhood that I’ve ever seen or experienced, well, at least in the realm of cinema. And you don’t need to tell me that the character is an arsehole for a whole host of other reasons. But why it stands out for me is that it’s an argument, at a very different volume, used by many dads to justify their own selfishness, or their own withdrawal from their families.
It’s the “well, my child, I don’t need to be around much or actually relate to you as a human being much because I have to be out there far away earning the big dollars in order to keep you in the luxury that you demand. Do you have any idea how expensive all those things you never asked for are, the clothes on your back and the food on your plate? I have to be out there, far away, unavailable to you physically and emotionally, because that’s just the way of the fatherly world. In fact, have you submitted that application on my behalf for Father of the Year yet?”
Because what else would happen when your adored and respected father has probably got a whole other life on the side?
You realise, huh, that isn’t why he spends all that time away from us: it’s because he’s a selfish jerk!
And yet there is still much to appreciate about the guilt he (Folarin) feels towards his sons at least, if not his wife, for his absences. He eventually takes his sons to the ocean for a swim, something they seemingly haven’t done before.
And look, Barry Jenkins didn’t invent the ocean, nor did he invent fathers and / or father figures swimming with their impressionable little men / sons in the water as a symbol of gentleness, of love, of support, so it’s not fair to say that this sequence might have been less inspired by the maker’s memories than it was by Barry Jenkin’s superb film Moonlight, but it’s hard to completely ignore if you’ve seen both films. It’s still used evocatively here, and it’s a great sequence in a flick that has lofty ambitions, emotionally and otherwise.
Maybe he’s a selfish prick away from his sons, but he does seem to love them, and he really does want them to understand where he’s coming from, even as the country starts falling apart around them.
Soon after, the results of the election are released, or, in a sense, anti-released, and all hell breaks lose, and the army starts going after random people on the street. All the man wants to do is get his boys home safe, but it’s not clear that anyway is safe when a dictatorship starts feeling fragile.
When a soldier starts telling Folarin that he recognises him, because he must have been at a place called Bonny Camp last week, a different soldier convinces the guy “you couldn’t be recognising this guy from last week if he’s alive: we killed everyone that was there” it’s a moment so chilling that I wondered if anyone was going to survive.
Some people obviously did. These two remarkable brothers did. Both of them, brothers in real life as well (Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) give startlingly wonderful performances. There’s none of this overly precocious bullshit or kids schooling all the adults around them with their brilliance and observational skills type stuff. They’re just kids, often sullen, often told to be respectful to this person or that person, who are mostly seen as a burden and a hassle by the people around them, the adults, all of whom are hiding their selfish bullshit and putting up fronts, which the kids know, they always know, even if they don’t know the reasons.
Sope Dirisu, though, what a performance. He doesn’t lean into any aspect of the character’s personality too heavily, which is a blessing. He’s serious, and protective, but he’s not a tyrant. He’s encourages the boys to be selfless towards each other but guarded, wary against the world. He’s clearly a charmer and a guy who gets things done, but he doesn’t want his boys to see him as a smooth operator, because then he’s not a dutiful dad. He wants them to learn from his example, but do better than the example he was given.
His most starting line of dialogue involves telling the boys that his own father had many wives, and right before he abandoned Folarin and his mother he told him “A man must look after his family.” It’s not played for irony, and the turmoil within him doesn’t have to be made explicit, because we can see how it twists him internally.
It’s a beautifully crafted, mesmerising film.
8 times they fuck you up your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do out of 10
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“Everything is sacrifice. You just have to pray you don't sacrifice the wrong thing” - My Father’s Shadow
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