“My Father’s Shadow” Is Intensely—Yet Obliquely—Autobiographical
Most of the movie takes place in the span of a single day, and two clocks, political and personal, seem to be ticking out of synch, urgently and discordantly. Folarin’s political engagement emerges by chance when he runs into a long-unseen friend (Olarotimi Fakunle), whose nickname, Corridor, reflects his size and his ability to open paths through crowds. Corridor, who addresses Folarin as Kapo and “my leader,” is pessimistic about the chances for democracy. He thinks the regime is digging in and says that it has killed four of their fellow opposition supporters. The boys soon see another headline—“Military Deny Deaths at Bonny Camp”—and, when a fight breaks out in the street, Folarin hustles them away.
The second ticking clock involves an urgent private matter: Folarin hasn’t been paid in six months and shows up at the factory to confront his supervisor and demand his due. But the supervisor won’t be in until the night shift, so to kill time Folarin takes his sons on a series of visits to some friends and some favorite places. The resulting rambles through town, aboard motorcycle taxis on which all three pile up along with the drivers, become, for Folarin, trips through his own memories. He shows his sons sites of his youth, takes them to hang out with his crowd in a bar, and tells them romantic stories of his streetwise courtship of their mother. (A friend chimes in that the couple was considered “a local Romeo and Juliet.”) During a stopover for a quick swim in the sea—a scene that has overtones of the iconic swimming scene in “Moonlight”—Folarin recounts a traumatic story from his childhood: the death, by drowning, of his older brother, for whom Olaremi is named.
In this way, Akinola and Wale Davies establish two parallel awakenings for the brothers in the film, and everything that the boys see and hear—not just dialogue but all their ambient impressions—contribute to one or both. There is a political awakening, triggered by the fearful atmosphere surrounding the electoral crisis and the ensuing military crackdown, which in the film resonates as a shared national memory. The other awakening concerns a second order of memory: family memory. The brothers gradually develop a sense of their parents’ intimate history, which, given that it’s their own backstory, becomes intermingled with their identities and self-images.
All the knowledge—or ignorance—that a viewer brings to a movie, whatever knowledge a viewer gains about the making and the makers, is an inextricable part of the viewing experience. I knew little about Nigeria’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, and so only from the film did I learn that the 1993 election was annulled by the country’s autocratic regime. In the movie, moments after the annulment is announced—on TV while father and sons are in a bar—gunshots are heard. As the streets of Lagos begin to roil with protest and repression, Folarin rushes to get his sons out of the city and to safety. I also learned, from reading interviews with Akinola Davies about “My Father’s Shadow,” that the movie’s unfolding of memory parallels his own. The brothers Davies, far from merely depicting their childhood memories, are in fact making a past for themselves and for a father they didn’t have.
Akinola and Wale Davies’s father died, of an epileptic seizure, when Akinola, born in 1985, was just twenty months old. Wale, like Olaremi in the film, is three years older, so they were just about the ages of the onscreen brothers during the events of 1993. For the movie, they have reconfigured their early days into a counterlife, drawing on what they remember, on family lore that their mother and other relatives have imprinted on them, and on their later visits to Lagos. Davies’s direction reflects the variety of threads on which the movie’s subjectivity is based; one of the film’s most striking scenes occurs in the brothers’ absence. They’ve been sent to play at a shuttered amusement park, whose elderly caretaker (Ayo Lijadu) is a friend of Folarin’s. The friend, recently widowed, reproaches himself at length for the way he treated his wife, and, for the duration of the man’s monologue, the camera holds Folarin in an extended closeup, hinting at unspoken marital discord and pangs of conscience of his own.
