Review: My Father’s Shadow — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

My Father’s Shadow

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

Stars: Godwin and Chibuike Egbo, Sope Dirisu

Writers: Akinola and Wale Davies

Director: Akinola Davies

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

 

Two generations draw closer while tasting the bitter fruit of disillusionment in My Father’s Shadow, a sometimes searing but unapologetically sentimental family drama focusing on a pair of young boys who accompany their idealistic, hard-working father on a day trip to Lagos, Nigeria.

The year is 1993, and young Aki and Remi (real-life brothers Godwin and Chibuike Egbo) are whiling away the morning outside their family’s rural Nigerian home. Playing with home-made action figures and getting on each other’s nerves, the boys exude a mix of excitement and trepidation: Their father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu of TV’s Slow Horses) is inside the house, back from one of his extended stays toiling as a factory worker in the capital.

In fact, after just one night home, Folarin is getting ready to depart for Lagos yet again, this time seeking to collect some long-overdue back pay from his boss. Seeing the disappointment in his sons’ eyes, he sighs deeply and tells them to go put on their shoes: He’s taking them with him.

Filmed almost entirely from the down-low vantage point of a young boy, My Father’s Shadow chronicles what is, for Aki and Remi, an adventure not unlike being swept up by a tornado and deposited in the land of Oz. Even after the long slog to a barely marked bus stop; even when that bus runs out of gas and the trio must ride in the bed of a pickup truck the rest of the way to the city, Aki and Remi watch the unfolding urbanization around them with wide-eyed wonder.

“This is the longest bridge in Africa!” Dad announces with tour guide-like authority as the truck rattles across Lagos’s Third Mainland Bridge. One of his sons corrects him: This has to be the longest bridge in the whole world.

For the boys, the wonders have no end: The street markets offer a dizzying variety of undreamed-of treasures (even ice cream!). The gleaming, sweeping profile of Nigeria’s National Theater seems to glow in defiance of the city’s pervasive poverty. A dilapidated amusement park may as well be Disneyland.

Likewise, a side trip to a beach on Lagos’s Atlantic coast starts out as a splashy lark — but all too soon it devolves into a somber moment of truth. As the surf pounds at their feet, Remi confronts his father about his extended absences, questioning his love for both the boys and their mother.

At that moment, the road trip vibe of My Father’s Shadow comes to a shuddering halt. Tears welling in his eyes, Folarin explains the harsh economic realities of life in Nigeria. He also, after a lifetime of silence, confides the story of a family tragedy that haunts him to this day.

Still, there is much Folarin leaves unexplained, like why everyone they meet in the city seems surprised not just to see Folarin, but also to see that he’s alive. And why his nose keeps bleeding. And why he seems so personally invested in the outcome of a recent Nigerian presidential election.

It is that 1993 election — a historic turning point in Nigeria’s history — that provides a hum of unseen menace behind every moment of My Father’s Shadow. For the first time ever, a truly democratic election is giving Nigeria’s populace a chance to oust the current military dictatorship and install as president M. K. O. Abiola, a wealthy and influential businessman. As every poll shows Abiola winning in a landslide, Folarin and his friends laugh, almost giddily, at the prospect of a new, democratic, free-market Nigeria.

But even as the votes are being counted, there is in the streets an ominously increasing presence of armed soldiers, many of whom seem to eye Folarin with suspicion. Finally, as Folarin and the boys watch TV news at a local café, the country’s military leader announces he is annulling the election results because of what he describes as widespread fraud at the polls.

The café erupts with anger — quickly followed by fear, as the sound of gunshots filters in from the streets. And in a harrowing nightscape of burning cars and roving bands of soldiers, Folarin desperately tries to find a way out of the city with his now-terrified children.

Director Akinola Davies, who co-wrote the script with his brother Wale, draws heavily on his own Nigerian childhood. With each moment of gathering darkness, the film etches a vivid portrait of a family — and country — scarred by the past yet facing the future with grim determination and a touch of unrealistic optimism.

Like Folarin, the script leaves a few too many pivotal questions unanswered; mysteries that the filmmakers apparently intend to be after-film discussion-starters become, in the end, frustrating dead ends. Still, the movie immerses its audience in a world of perils and personalities that ring with authenticity.

As the brothers — engaged in the simmering style of psychological warfare that only siblings can understand — the Egbos evoke a streetwise kind of innocence. They are a couple of scene stealers, for sure, but the film truly belongs to Dirisu, who spends the first third of the movie as something of a cipher, then bursts into focus as a man who longs for the kind of normalcy that remains, at least in his experience, beyond his grasp.

But that doesn’t stop him from reaching for a better life as if his life depends on it.