‘My Father’s Shadow’ brings Lagos drama to SA

An urgent trip in Nigeria forces two brothers to see beyond the mystery of their absent father in Akinola Davies Jr’s debut movie.

My Father’s Shadow is screening for a limited run across Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town from today (18 September 2026). The film releases as part of the 13th European Film Festival South Africa (EUFFSA).

The production, from the British-Nigerian director, won a BAFTA Award for outstanding debut. The movie uses a childhood perspective to develop a distinctive approach to African-set cinematic storytelling.

Set in the countryside outside Lagos on a sweltering day in June 1993, the story begins when bored brothers Remi and Akin are surprised to find their usually absent father, Folarin, at home. Their surprise deepens when he tells them to get dressed and accompany him on an urgent journey.

Tensions over the results of the general election build as the family travels through the city. Remi and Akin learn unsettling details about their father’s past and present before becoming caught in one of the country’s most significant political moments. Their immediate struggle is to return to their mother and home.

Haunting imagery meets the bustling, vivid and angry life surrounding the family. The movie pays tribute to the creators’ father and to parents who struggle every day to keep their families alive and together amid broader social and political turmoil.

The Last Viking. Photo supplied.

Sope Dirisu leads the cast alongside young brothers Godwin and Chibuike Egbo. Davies Jr co-wrote the feature with his brother, Wale Davies, drawing inspiration from a memory of their own father.

“As the world faces ever faster and enormous changes, the festival’s offerings from across the continent paints intimate, human portraits of family in all its different forms as vital to personal, psychological and social survival,” says the EUFFSA.

“The festival pays tribute to the tireless dedication and vision of a former co-director of the festival Peter Rorvik, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Peter was a passionate supporter of independent films, and nurtured a generation of film lovers and filmmakers across South Africa and beyond for decades.”

My Father’s Shadow is one of 12 films in this year’s EUFFSA. The festival provides the following information about the remaining 11 productions:

Opening the festival is The Last Viking, with Denmark’s biggest star Mads Mikkelsen, leading the star-studded cast of this madcap, blackly comic Danish family-drama/crime-caper-noir about brothers, mental health, past secrets, the Beatles and getting by with more than a little bit of help from your friends.

In Young Mothers (Belgium). Photo supplied.

Germany’s offering Fatherland directed by Oscar-winning director Paweł Pawlikowski (Ida and Cold War), European cinema’s master of visual and narrative precision, delivers a tightly controlled, intimate, and heart-breaking portrait of German literature’s legendary Thomas Mann as he and his daughter make a journey across a nation trying to grapple with grief and the horrors of the past as the Cold War rages. Winner of the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Festival, the film stars Oscar-nominated Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall).

In Young Mothers (Belgium), the multiple award-winning Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne paint a small, gritty, and empathetic portrait of the struggles of young mothers. Abandoned by their families and society, these courageous and anxious young women support each other as they make the first of many tough adult decisions of their lives. Winner of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes this year.

Oscar- and BAFTA-winning leading Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) reteams with collaborator Toni Servillo in La Grazia (Italy). Servillo won a Best Actor statue at the Venice Film Festival for his performance in this elegantly styled, intimate drama about fathers, daughters, love, duty and the eternal question of “who owns our days?”- set against the grubby backdrop of Italian politics.

Colours of Time (France). Photo supplied.

Colours of Time (France), directed by Cédric Klapisch is a family drama that weaves together stories from one family’s 19th century past and their 21st-century present. A memorably delightful and touching exploration of art, family and history.

Porcelain War (Ukraine) directed by Brendan Bellomo and this stunning documentary’s key protagonist, Slava Leontyev, is an inspirational Oscar-nominated film in which Leontyev, his wife, and their friend tell, at great personal risk and with footage they shot, the story of how their lives as artists were brutally upended by the war in Ukraine. Now, with roles as Ukrainian soldiers – they’ve never lost their passion for art and nature as they risk everything for family, nation and freedom.

Oscar winner Javier Bardem gives a brooding performance as the fictional, acclaimed, mercurial Spanish film director Esteban Martínez in The Beloved (Spain). Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Martinez returns to his homeland to film a colonial-era period drama set in the Western Sahara. The film unravels the fragile relationship between fathers and daughters and asks difficult questions about personal sacrifices made in service of art.

In A Family (Netherlands) Dutch director Mees Peijnenburg offers a powerful window on divorce in modern Europe, told empathetically through the eyes of a brother and sister trying to each find their own ways and hopefully a path together through the aftermath of the bitter war between their parents. It stars Carice van Houten (Game of Thrones) and Pieter Embrechts.

Porcelain War (Ukraine). Photo supplied.

Veteran award-winning Polish director Agnieszka Holland offers an energetic and generally bright biopic about the enigmatic literary genius Franz Kafka, in Franz. The film contemplates its protagonist, his difficult relationship with his father, and imagines how his legacy might be celebrated in the future.

Ireland’s Christy is the debut feature from Brendan Canty that has picked up many nominations and awards at this year’s Irish Film and TV Awards for its tender direction and impressive lead performance from Danny Power as the title character – a teenager with a murkily remembered tragic past, who, after he’s kicked out of his latest foster home, returns to Cork to stay with his estranged brother. As he tries to figure out his future, he rediscovers the relationship with his brother and begins to imagine a home among people in a place he might yet grow to know and love.

The extraordinary and original, Aquí (Portugal) is director Tiago Guedes’ ambitious, epic and suitably enigmatic adaptation of the Jesus trilogy of novels by South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. It stays true to its source material’s humanist hopes, despairs and probing of the eternal philosophical questions that keep families and societies eternally (and anxiously) moving onward.

* To view screening details, visit the European Film Festival South Africa website here.

*Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and deputy editor of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky at @jas2bann.**

The post ‘My Father’s Shadow’ brings Lagos drama to SA appeared first on Gadget.