How 'My Father's Shadow' Reinvents The Ghost Story

"The film has been touted as an Africa-set complement to a bittersweet coming-of-age drama like Aftersun, and on one level, that's true. It follows a day in the life of two young brothers as they're whisked from their home in the Nigerian backcountry and into the bustling city of Lagos, where they reconnect with their father Fọlárìn (an immaculate Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù)."

""You're unsure of where this took place and that speaks to the memory of a child." My Father's Shadow offered both an outlet to interrogate those conflicting emotions, and to confront ideas of strong, silent masculinity that'd persisted through generations. "I wanted to ground it the conversations we never had, in the conversations we'd like to have for the women in our lives," Davies continues."

My Father's Shadow follows two young brothers as they travel from the Nigerian backcountry to Lagos to reconnect with their father, Fọlárìn. The story begins as a tender coming-of-age day-in-the-life drama and shifts into metaphysical territory that blends ghost-story imagery and Afrofuturist fable. The filmmakers use imagined conversations and memory to process grief toward an absent father and to interrogate inherited, strong-silent masculinities. Performances and intimate specificity ground the personal history, aiming to surface the unspoken conversations and emotional complexities that shaped the protagonists and the women around them.

Read at Inverse