My Father’s Shadow made history when it became the first Nigerian film to be part of the official selection at Cannes.
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It went on to claim the Camera d’Or Special Mention, and Akinola Davies Jr scooped up the Outstanding Debut Award at the 2026 BAFTAs. Shortly after, Davies shared that “it came as a surprise,” reflecting on the strength of the other films he was up against. He was quick to frame the win as collective. “I think all the collaborators who worked on the film are really deserving. And it just goes to show how universal our story and African stories can be. I’m really proud because so many people poured into the film, and now they’re all BAFTA winners.”
That sense of universality is earned. My Father’s Shadow is, at its core, a film about what it means to be a father when the conditions of your life make fatherhood almost impossible to perform. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t need to.
We meet brothers Akin (Godwin Chiemerie Egbo) and Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) playing with paper action figures, until their father Folarin (แนขแปpแบนฬ Dรฌrรญsรน) arrives home. The boys snap to attention immediately. Their surprise is charged with something harder to name – awe, confusion, a kind of wariness. Folarin makes no apology for his absence. He doesn’t say hello. Instead, fresh from the shower, he asks whether they’ve been touching his things, because he can’t find his watch. Learning his wife is away in the village and no one is looking after the boys, he announces a surprise trip to Lagos.
The scene establishes everything the film cares about. Folarin is physically present and emotionally withheld and in his presence his boys are still and unsure. The camera drops low, close to their eyeline, placing us inside their experience rather than above it. When Folarin is on screen alone, the angles widen and the distance opens. It’s a quiet but deliberate choice capturing the gap between father and sons felt in the framing before it’s ever spoken aloud.
If there’s a moment that makes clear that My Father’s Shadow is about what’s left unsaid, it’s when Folarin tells his sons “Sometimes โฆ It’s hard to know what to do. I want to be with you boys and your mother always โฆ but life is not like that. Nigeria is hard.” It lands less like an excuse and more like a confession. His absence stops feeling like a lack of interest and starts feeling like survival. He isn’t around much because he’s in the city earning money. But hearing him say it doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking.
The film is set in the early 1990s, during a period of economic strain and political uncertainty in Nigeria, and the Davies brothers let those pressures seep into every corner of the story. Folarin travels to Lagos for work. The bus they take runs out of fuel mid-journey. These aren’t incidental details they sketch the portrait of a country in flux, and of a man whose choices are never entirely his own. His distance isn’t cruelty. It’s the product of a life, and a country, where providing for your family pulls you away from it.
The beach is where the film breathes. Lagos isn’t just a backdrop in My Father’s Shadow it’s another character, interrupting and shaping every interaction. But at the water’s edge, the city falls away and Folarin lets his guard down. He tells the boys that “the memories that pain you when someone leaves are the same ones that will comfort you later,” and reminds Remi, “As the older brother, you are meant to protect him [Akin] always โฆ you and Akin must always look after each other.” He shares his resentment toward his own father for leaving his mother. He tells Remi about his brother, who drowned. Taking off the necklace that he always wears now revealed to have belonged to his brother, and places it around his oldest son’s neck. In that moment, you see a man passing on what he’s learned while he still can.It doesn’t last. A whale has washed up on the shore, already being picked apart by crows. Lagos reasserts itself. The tenderness closes over. But you’ve seen it, and you can’t unsee it.
Threaded through the film is a phrase the boys repeat like a prayer: “Dear father, I will see you in my dreams.” It carries a double meaning. Directed at Folarin, but also at God, echoing what their mother (who we never meet on screen) has told them: “God loves us very much.” Remi, taking his older brother role seriously, turns this back on Folarin at the beach. If God loves them very much and they don’t get to see him always, does that mean that’s just what love looks like? It’s a small moment, reminds of how children use faith and story to make sense of absence, to find reason with something that has no good explanation.
What Davies Jr does so beautifully is refuse to simplify Folarin. He’s unfaithful to his wife. He’s also capable of profound tenderness. People in Lagos greet him warmly, hinting at a man whose coldness at home isn’t the whole of him. The judgement you feel early on shifts into something harder to resolve. He isn’t hero or villain he’s a full, flawed person who had an entire life before his children arrived, and who is trying, imperfectly, to reckon with what that means.
Rather than asking whether Folarin is a good or bad father, My Father’s Shadow asks something more honest: what does fatherhood look like when the world makes it this hard? The answer it offers is neither comforting nor condemning. It simply asks you to sit with it.
What stays with you long after the credits roll isn’t the politics or the plot. It’s the feeling. The way love shows up in imperfect, uneven gestures. The pauses. The things Folarin can’t quite bring himself to say, and the things his boys understand anyway.
My Father’s Shadow is available to watch on Mubi.