My Father’s Shadow

Power is a force that turns anyone who submits to it into a thing.
Simone Weil

In My Father’s Shadow, Akinola Davies Jr. does not construct a simple family narrative, but rather a critical device in which intimacy becomes a lens through which history is read.
Presented at Cannes in 2025, the film situates itself within a suspended yet decisive moment: Lagos, 1993—a city held on the edge of an unfulfilled democratic promise, as the air grows dense with expectation, fear, and possibility. 

In 1993, Nigeria was living through one of the most delicate moments in its recent history. The country stood between the announced end of military rule and the return to a civilian government that finally seemed within reach. The presidential election of June 12, overwhelmingly won by Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, embodied this hope. An entrepreneur, philanthropist, and cross-cutting political figure, Abiola represented the idea of a democracy finally shared. Yet that victory was erased, annulled from above, and with it the illusion of a peaceful transition. From that point onward, Nigeria entered a zone of political shadow, marked by protests, repression, and widespread violence.

It is within this climate that the film takes shape. Lagos is not a backdrop, but an organism under pressure. The city is traversed by military presences, improvised checkpoints, and voices speaking of imminent turning points. Among these places emerges—never as a mere geographic reference, but as a symbolic presence—the Bonny Camp, one of the capital’s principal military hubs. A site where armed power is concentrated, where crucial decisions have historically been made far from the civilian gaze, Bonny Camp becomes in the film a kind of invisible center of gravity: not always shown, but constantly perceived.

Historically, the camp has functioned as a nerve center of Nigerian power dynamics, a place where the country’s fate has repeatedly been debated and diverted. In earlier years it had already hosted decisive meetings, preludes to coups and forced reconfigurations of political order. In 1993, its presence weighs upon the city like a silent reminder: democracy in Nigeria has never been a linear conquest, but a contested terrain.

Davies Jr. does not reconstruct these events in a didactic manner. He allows them to filter through bodies, glances, silences. The institutional crisis becomes an emotional condition: characters move as if something might collapse at any moment—and indeed, it does. Political violence—culminating in a renewed authoritarian order and bloody repression—often remains offscreen, yet its weight is everywhere. It interrupts trajectories, fractures dialogue, and transforms an ordinary day into a liminal experience.

In this sense, My Father’s Shadow is profoundly semi-autobiographical not so much in what it recounts, but in how it chooses to remember. The absence of the father—an intermittent figure, never fully graspable—overlaps with the absence of a legitimate political guide, of a state capable of recognizing its own people. The father’s trajectory thus becomes a fragile yet powerful metaphor: like Abiola, he is a promised presence later denied; like Nigerian democracy, he arrives too late, or perhaps already compromised.

The figure of Abiola moves through the film like an ideological shadow. He is never directly embodied, yet his story—the annulled victory, imprisonment, and death abruptly closing a horizon of possibility—resonates as an unresolved collective trauma. Abiola is not merely a failed leader, but the symbol of what could have been and was not: a nation capable of recognizing itself in its own choices.

Davies Jr.’s cinema operates through subtraction. It prefers to let the spectator feel the fracture, to perceive the invisible bond between a family attempting to reassemble itself and a state in the process of disintegration. In this overlap, the film acquires a rare force: it suggests that political experience is never abstract, but settles into relationships, memories, and bodies that move through public space.

Within this interweaving of individual and national history, the film avoids all forms of celebratory or nostalgic rhetoric. Memory is not treated as sentimental recovery of the past, but as a critical space, marked by absences and discontinuities. Lagos in 1993 is not mythologized; it is shown as a city under strain, shaped by a failed transition and by a future that remains undefined.

My Father’s Shadow is, ultimately, a film about inheritance—not the one that is received, but the one left unfinished. An work that interrogates memory as a political act and childhood as the place where history leaves its deepest imprints. Looking at the past not to archive it, but to let it settle into memory, in the refusal to accept the authoritarian and violent arrogance of power.

The real problem is not that power lies, but that the lie becomes the system.
Václav Havel