My Father’s Shadow: a ‘magically nimble’ love letter to Lagos

A “coming-of-age film” with “inspired” casting, this Nigerian drama is set during that country’s turbulent 1993 presidential election, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times.

Mainly told over the course of one day, it opens with two boys aged eight and 11 (played by the brothers Godwin Egbo and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo) mucking around at home, when their father (Sopé Dìrísù, known for TV’s “Slow Horses”), whom they barely know, turns up – and to their delight, takes them on a trip to Lagos.

The film (in English, Yoruba and pidgin English) “is made in a mode that you might call Hallucinatory Realism: events and images flashing before the camera in the same rush that the boys experience them”. We get a “panorama of 1993 Lagos, but also fleeting, arresting details (ants on a cracked wall, sand-specked crabs on the beach)”. The overall effect is of a dream, and one “you want to experience again right away”.

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Director Akinola Davies Jr co-wrote the script with his brother, Wale Davies, said Thomas Page on CNN. Their father died young, and so they were never able to spend the day scampering around after him in Lagos. The result is a “sad, serious and tender” film that also feels like a “devastating act of wish fulfilment”.

Yet the father here is more than just a “ghostly ideal”, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. The way he interacts with his sons is just one of the highlights of a “magically nimble” film.