A Conversation With the Ocean: Akinola Davies Jr. on My Father’s Shadow

In a brief yet powerful sequence in Akinola Davies Jr.’s mesmerizing My Father’s Shadow (2025), brothers Akin (Godwin Egbo) and Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) hitchhike with their father Folarin (Sope Dirisu) to the country’s capital, Lagos. Crossing the Third Mainland Bridge, the young boys cast their inquisitive gaze toward the changing vista, in which winding roads give way to coruscating lagoons, dotted with paddleboats and wooden rafts. There’s a glimpse, too, of Makoko, the sprawling, floating shantytown that is home to the most impoverished people in the city. 

This moment of crossing shimmers with both beauty and nostalgia. Considering the recent destruction of Makoko—which was razed to the ground by the Nigerian government in 2026—the scene now functions as a form of archive, a visual document of Lagos’s changed urban contours. It also marks the traversal of multiple thresholds. In departing from their rural village for the big city, Akin and Remi emerge from the cocoon of childhood into the world of adults. Throughout the trip, the siblings glean new information about their enigmatic father, his private struggles and pains. In 1993, the year in which My Father’s Shadow unfolds, Nigeria, too, was on the cusp of change. A general election carried the promise of a democratic transition from military to civilian rule. But when the results were suppressed by the incumbent government, the country was sent spinning into unrest.

Akinola Davies Jr. delicately renders these crises—both political and personal—through a child’s eyes, deploying a similar point of view to that seen in his debut narrative short Lizard (2020). The first Nigerian production to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, this earlier film follows a young girl who wanders the grounds of her Sunday school after being admonished by the headteacher. In pursuit of an Agama lizard, the curious girl comes face to face with the secrets and hypocrisies of those who lead the church. Like Lizard, My Father’s Shadow also made history as the first Nigerian film to premiere in the Official Selection at Cannes, where it received a Special Mention for the Caméra d'Or. Both cowritten by Davies Jr. with his brother Wale Davies, the two films are not only sensitive to the emotional turmoil of children, but also to the environments they inhabit. My Father’s Shadow features a dense sound mix that weaves together the murmurs of nature, cacophonous news reports, and a hypnotic score by Duval Timothy and CJ Mirra. Enveloped in these varied sonic tones, the boys’ immersion in the hubbub of Lagos turns strikingly sensorial, and is lent further tactility by the textured 16mm cinematography. 

Just like the bridge scene, My Father’s Shadow spans multiple terrains, weaving together memoir, fiction, and even historical materials. Speaking to Phuong Le, Davies Jr. discusses the relationship between humans and nature, the challenge of extracting beauty from chaos, and the notion of cinema as witness.

MUBI: So much of the magic of the film comes from the interaction between the child performers, who are real-life brothers as well. Was it always your intention to cast actual siblings? Or did that casting come out of this sense of spontaneity and play?

DAVIES JR.: My dream was always to find brothers; I thought that would be amazing. But that was quite an ambitious dream. My intention was just to find the best actors. Fortunately, we managed to find real brothers who delivered. But the casting did come quite spontaneously, because on the first day that we met them, we didn’t know they were brothers. The second time we met them, on the second day when they came back, they were labeled properly. Then, everybody got quite excited about us finding real brothers. Loads of people still don’t know they’re related, even though we put that information in a lot of our documentation around the film. But yeah, I think it came out of a certain level of spontaneity. The beauty of having real brothers is that you get a certain intimacy and chemistry that would take a lot longer to replicate with actors. It’s really a testament to Godwin and Marvellous’s openness and their understanding of what we were trying to achieve.

MUBI: Since the children already had this established intimacy, how did you bring Sope Dirisu into their existing dynamic?

DAVIES JR.: Going into long-form filmmaking, I always have this anxiousness of, like, What if my idea of something doesn’t work out? But the beauty of working in films is that you’re collaborating with lots of people. Sope just came with loads of ideas about who the character should be. He had a lot of patience and willingness to nurture the boys and take them under his wing. So I didn’t really have to do much. Just by being with them every day and running lines with them and being their father on screen really endeared Sope to them. There was even more intimacy off screen, because they were just a unit all the time. It was really beautiful to watch. I’d love to take credit for it, but once artists buy into something (and all three of them are artists), there’s a shorthand for what you’re trying to achieve. I was really lucky that for my novice feature the casting did a lot of the heavy lifting. Everything we were looking for was already there. I only needed to give people the space to perform.

MUBI: In the film, there’s a lot of bickering between the boys, but also a lot of love. You cowrote this film, as well as your first narrative short Lizard, with your brother Wale. How does that process of collaboration unfold in practice? Do you write together, or do you work independently?

DAVIES JR.: No, we write together. I have a lot of ideas and I know I have it in me to write, but I prefer, again, to be quite collaborative. I like to spend time with people. I like to try and understand where they’re coming from and vice versa. I love to encourage their ideas and not just shut things down. That enables the work to take on dual personalities and become more well-rounded as a result. Me and my brother, we would spend a number of days together with the intention of just writing. Normally, we talk. We watch things. We have debates. We bicker. And we try to ensure that much of it makes it into the work. But also, when we’re talking specifically about My Father’s Shadow, I think that’s how children play. It would be weird to make a film where children are the protagonists and then forget to show what they are actually like. We needed people to be with them and to feel what they feel, either through the camera or the dialogue.

MUBI: The film feels very empathetic towards the gaze of children. It’s tough to be a kid. There’s a lot of waiting. They can’t just go wherever they want to go, and their line of vision is not a complete one. They get information about the people and the world around them in snippets. Why did you choose to tell the story this way?

DAVIES JR.: I can’t speak for everyone, but I think there’s a responsibility, especially in My Father's Shadow, to depict what our reality was like as children, which was just a lot of waiting around. We grew up in Nigeria, which is different from the UK. Here, you can go to parks, meet with friends, or just jump on the bus. Not to say that we couldn’t do that in Nigeria, but it was just culturally not what you do. If you’re going somewhere with your parents, you have to sit around and indulge your own imagination. You have to be observant and try to make it entertaining for yourself. Because the viewers are with the children, we wanted to create something that is a lot more dependent on listening, on body language, on acknowledging what they’re hearing, even as they have no capacity to comment on it or to act on it. They can only observe. 

One of my favorite writers, James Baldwin, spoke about the Civil Rights era in America. He said that Malcolm X was doing this and Martin Luther King was doing that, and he felt insufficient because he was like, What is my contribution to all this? I’m not rallying people. I’m not fighting. Then he realized at some point that his job was to be a witness. More often than not, the witnesses are crucial to our understanding of and framing of what was happening in the world. Journalism, for instance, plays a part. But in this film, the children are the witnesses. So many people haven’t been to Nigeria, and they don’t really understand the culture. They don’t know what the city looks like. So coming at it from the children’s perspective allows us to effectively bring the world to our audience. But equally, my brother and I were very adamant that, if we’re going to depict the world for an international audience, we need to be able to make it as true to form as possible.

MUBI: There’s a lot of crosscutting between the gaze of the children and the animals that surround them. It’s a parallel that exists in both Lizard and in My Father’s Shadow. Why this focus on animals?

DAVIES JR.: I think animals deserve as much parity and equity as humans do. We share our cities, our towns, our continents with animals. One can argue that a lot of them have been here longer than us. More specifically, I’m from a tribe called Yoruba. Our indigenous belief systems are animist, which basically means that every aspect of nature has a spirit. So whether that’s the trees, the oceans, the animals, or the moon, everything is revered in these customs. 

I’m very sensitive to nature. I saw a crow on the top of my building the other day, and I started googling what it means. We have a dialogue with animals that we don’t embrace or center enough. Animals and children have the capacity to be completely unpredictable. That unpredictability excites me, because you can't control it. Anything can happen because you’re dealing with something that’s in a bit of a primal flow. Capturing that primal state feels a lot more authentic because it’s not socialized. It’s not governed by ideas that are like, Oh, I need to look this way for the camera and do this or do that. It just exists. There’s something about that I just really love.

MUBI: That reminds me of the sequence on the beach when the three of them go into the water. Something your film does really well is to present these different ideas of masculinity. There’s the state as a kind of patriarchy. We see men with guns. Folarin is a very interesting character as he carries both strength and vulnerability, and the ocean holds a lot of contradictions as well.

DAVIES JR.: The whole film is probably built around that central scene. It was certainly what made me most emotional the first time I read the script. If you’re West African, the ocean is quite a big character in all our lives. If we’re going back to enslaved people and the transatlantic trade, the ocean holds so much memory, so much pain. But equally, like when I speak about this idea of being animist, it’s also something we completely revere. The ocean has a clarifying capacity, a capacity for bringing forth new ideas and new emotions. Especially for my brother. My brother is the type of person who goes to the beach and then stands waist-deep in the ocean. And he'll be having a conversation with the ocean. So it’s always been quite central to our existence. That scene just worked out, you know? The filming of it is just like the thing of nightmares, really. But it turned out to be so potent because it was so difficult to achieve. It seems so simple when you watch it, but it was basically two days of pure chaos.

MUBI: Why was it chaotic?

DAVIES JR.: Because of just... everything. Everything was chaotic. The scene is shot on the same island, but across two different beaches, one of which is a very touristy area. On the day we were shooting on that beach, the whole crew basically thought they were on vacation. It was quite tough to get everybody to focus. The boys couldn’t swim. The initial idea was to shoot the scene in the water, but Marvellous’s performance was very frozen, so we had to pivot to shooting on the beach. That’s why we cut between the beach and the ocean. This sort of worked out in terms of playing with this idea of memory. And the bit with the whale—argh! That was just a nightmare. The framing of the whale was such a complex thing because it was pretty much all special effects. It was just a lot, but I think it had to be, because we ended up getting something that felt really, really special. The ocean has a huge part to play, but again, it’s nature; it’s not something you can control. The aesthetics of the scene were just incredible, like the big decaying oil tanker on the horizon was just the perfect backdrop for what the scene needed to be. 

MUBI: There’s a passing down of a necklace in My Father’s Shadow, and you also dedicate the film to your ancestors. Do you see the film as a kind of family heirloom as well?

DAVIES JR.: I think I said this around the film's premiere at some point, then it kind of fell out of the conversation. But, yes, definitely. That’s why I reject the title auteur, at least for myself. Other people can embrace it, but so much of this film is about instinct and collaboration. When you speak of an actor being Method—someone who lives and breathes a character—I ask myself, How does a film become Method? The ideas or the things we’re feeling, how do we embrace them in a way that really dictates how we create, how we film? So that we’re not just imposing ourselves onto something. So much of the film is cerebral. It’s really something that I don’t think I can necessarily take all the credit for. Everything falls into place when you’re submissive to what you’re trying to do, and you’re not trying to forcibly dictate that this is how it needs to be done. You just let the work do the talking.