Akinola Davies Jr. first decided he wanted to work in the film industry during a trip to a friend’s house in boarding school.
The friend’s mother was an artist, working in sculpture and ceramics. But the father’s office, with its huge chair and screens everywhere, felt more like a studio or a den than a place where one worked. Davies Jr. asked what his friend’s father did and learned that he was an editor.
“I was just like, well, whatever this setup is, I want this,” Davies Jr. remembered thinking. “I want this for myself.”
After university, he eventually wound up at the New York Film Academy for a three-month workshop before heading back to London and trying to find film work anywhere he could. He broke through with his short film “Lizard,” which became the first Nigerian production to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021.
Over the years, the other thing that’s stuck with him about that friend from boarding school is just how tightly knit his family was.
Davies Jr.’s father died from epilepsy when he was very young, and he and his siblings were raised by his mother. That upbringing has inspired his first feature film, “My Father’s Shadow,” which he directed and co-wrote with his brother, Wale Davies.
Inspired by their cut-short relationship with their father and their childhood in Nigeria, the film follows two boys, Akin and Remi (Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo), who spend the day in Lagos with their often-absentee father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu). The day happens to coincide with Nigeria’s 1993 presidential election, during which the military government nullified the democratic victory of Moshood Abiola, the Social Democratic Party candidate.
Ahead of the film’s release in Atlanta this weekend, Rough Draft spoke with Davies Jr. about the making of the film, his cinematic influences, and creating magic on screen. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
For this story in particular, your brother sent you a short film script, and then you started working and developing it into something larger. I’m curious about the process of turning something short form into something long form, because they are different mediums. What was the writing process like for y’all?
Akinola Davies Jr.: I think I learned in the process [of making the film] that the short film is about an event, and the long form is about characters … I think the process is different for everyone. I work with my brother, and I’m trying to work with other writers and stuff like that. But what I would say is that I think our process is heavily research based, because we feel like if we’re going to add to the canon of what it means to be African, what it means to be Black African, what it means to be filmmakers, we need to show the reality of our existence and not lean into a stereotype, or an outsider’s perspective of telling us who we are. A lot of the characters need to feel real. They need to be based on people in real life. They need to be dynamic, complex, and be well-rounded.
My brother, he reads a lot. He’s a lover of words and a lover of pictures and images. So we really compliment each other in this way. A lot of the films we love – and some films we don’t love – when they show African characters, we don’t necessarily recognize ourselves in those. Some of them are quite [a] caricature – and that’s no detriment to whoever made them. But ultimately, we’re middle class Africans, and we’re intelligent enough to be able to paint a picture of who we are and paint a picture of the working class experience in Nigeria, the working class experience across the continent.
[My brother], he’s more pragmatic with the words, and more with the pictures. I bring a lot of the filmic references. We watched a lot of African cinema from the 70s, in the era where loads of people were getting independence and becoming a lot more Pan-African and understanding about who they were. Like Ousmane Sembène, and Djibril Diop [Mambéty], and films from Martinique. People who are Pan-Africanists – early Spike Lee, big influence as well. Ava Duvernay, massive influence as well. Madi Diop. We draw from a lot of these places, and then we sort of filter it out. But we also work with our collaborators, who pour into the film and come with a lot of different ideas. It’s a real team effort.
I’m glad you brought up the idea of you and your brother seeing each yourselves on screen. I wanted to talk about the little boys that you found. I know they’re brothers in real life, and this movie is drawn from your personal experience growing up. When casting, what did you see in them? Did you see you and your brother as little kids? I read that they’re mom works in the industry, so they were good with words, and that kind of leveled them up. But what else was it about them?
Davies Jr.: Yeah, you read correctly. Their mom is a script writer and an actor, so they picked up dialogue really well. If I’m really honest, I didn’t see it in them to begin with. I didn’t see it on the first day, and I wasn’t confident enough to name it on the second day. We did these workshops, and I didn’t know they were brothers on the first day, but I saw that they were very tactile with each other. I was like, okay, well, something’s happening here. I’m not sure what it is, but something is sort of happening here. In the workshop on the second day, something that happened was they got labeled property, and then we realized that they were actually real brothers. Then it was our casting director and our team that really encouraged me. They were like, the kind of chemistry you have with brothers, you can’t buy that. You can’t recreate it and fabricate it in the time we have to make this film.
I really leaned on the expertise of the people I worked with to encourage me to pick these brothers. Because, I think knowing they’d never been in the film before was quite terrifying. Knowing that we were shooting on Super 16 as well, and them never having acted before, was quite terrifying. I was quite keen on picking kids who’d maybe been in a film before. But really and truly, I think their ability to remember the script, their ability to start telling other kids what to do and directing them – the crew saw it before me, and I’m glad I listened to the crew, because I think they were exceptional.
Speaking of the 16mm of it all, I loved the look of this film, particularly when it comes to memory and dreams. There are these flashes of a woman watching them throughout Lagos, and then there are the flashbacks that the father keeps having. Could you talk a little bit about trying to capture the essence of a dream or a memory visually, and the work that goes into that?
Davies Jr.: A lot of intention, a lot with great difficulty. I think a lot of it was on the page. Pre-colonial indigenous communities, especially Yoruba, our belief system is what you can animst. Animist basically means that you believe that every aspect of nature has a spirit, and we are the custodians of nature. We’re not above nature, but we live in harmony with it. So a lot of those shots of trees and plants and animals [are] really just a means to … show a reverence for [nature], whether it’s in the minutia or something larger.
We’re already dealing with the cosmology and the mythology around our belief systems, and then when you’re dealing with memory also – again, as Yoruba people, we don’t believe time is linear. We believe time exists in a spiral. You’re always in conversation with your ancestors in the past, present, and future. A lot of our upbringing centered around people talking about dreams, around what they saw in dreams, how they felt in dreams, how they were communicated to in dreams. A lot of our upbringing existed around there being no hierarchy between the animal world and the human world. There are all of these parables like the rabbit and the tortoise, and stuff like that.
I say all that to say, when you grow up around these kinds of stories, you believe in magic, ultimately. Magic becomes something that doesn’t feel other worldly, becomes something that’s very much in the present. I think cinema itself being magic allows [you] to create magic through sound design, through score, through picture, through costume, through performance, through visual effects, through the storytelling and words as well, and through the dialogue. All these things come together, and working with collaborators who equally believe in magic allows them to bring more and more ideas into it.
When you’re dealing with death and grief, there’s also a relationship that feels very illogical in terms of linearity. Like, sometimes you don’t cry at a funeral, but you will cry a year later. Sometimes you’ll realize you’re grieving a decade after you’ve lost someone. Again, time doesn’t feel very linear. It feels very on top of each other. I borrowed from watching filmmakers like Christopher Nolan make these kinds of non-linear stories, and then seeing that that is probably a reference of French New Wave, and how they kind of shift time. All of that just felt like, oh – there’s a language already that cinema has established, and I’m not creating anything new. I’m just borrowing from those languages.
Lastly, we worked with an editor, Omar Guzmán Castro from Mexico, who works with [filmmaker] Lila Avilés a lot. I think there’s a real symmetry between this idea of magical realism in Mexican cinema and how that is also reflective of African cinema. There’s a lot of Mexicans who are Afro-descendants, and places in Mexico that have a huge Afro-descendant community. I think it’s allowed them to believe in magic as well. So, I already had a short hand with an editor who comes from an outsider’s perspective, but he can see and position the alchemy of what we’ve shot and written, putting it together. He added the archive [footage]. I hadn’t conceived of adding archive into the film. I showed him as context, to understand the period. But he was was like, I’ve tried something – look at this. I was like, wow – it fits perfectly in terms of what we need.
One thing I’ve heard you talk about this movie as is these two unfulfilled promises – in getting to know and spending more time with a father, and then also in the failure of that Nigerian election and the political system. Could you talk a bit about working to connect those two ideas, whether it be through the writing or editing, like you just mentioned?
Davies Jr.: What we realized in the writing of the film was that we were telling a story – on the micro level, it’s a father and his two sons. It’s the promise that you believe every child is entitled to having their parents, of values and an understanding of the world, and how you’re positioned in the world. We realized during the development process that we needed some tension, and we needed to build Lagos as a character and Nigeria as a world into the story. We realized we’re the same age of the boys of the Nigerian election crisis, which we lived through. So it felt quite normal to situate it in our lived experience, and that lived experience echoed a lot of the micro. [There is] this Maverick politician who is going to become a father of a country. He was going to instill these values and the promise of what our country is entitled to, in terms of a diplomat and a stately figure. Both of those things not quite fulfilling that potential almost feels like hopes deferred and promises deferred. We realized we had a counterbalance, sort of the micro with a macro story. And Lagos being a character and Nigeria being a character really also lent itself to a lot of that magic as well.
That brings me to the conversation on the beach – which I’ve heard was a pretty chaotic day, and I won’t make you dive into that again – but there is a moment that I love, when the father is talking to Remy. That conversation feels like the crux for a lot of ideas in the film. But he says something to the effect of, it’s essential to make sacrifices, you just have to hope that you’ve sacrificed the right thing. I really love that line. It captures a lot of anxiety about parenthood, but also just life in general. Could you talk about crafting that conversation and getting that shot?
Davies Jr.: So I can’t take all the credit. I can take half the credit, of getting the shot. But I think the writing really comes from my brother. He’s been obsessed with our father in a different way. He was always in awe of our father, whereas I was more defensive of my mother and quite angry at my father for passing. The film is really generated from a conversation that he would have wanted to have with our father … If you watch the film again, knowing that I grew up with a single parent, and she had to overcome a patriarchal world and a very hostile society – if you watch the film again, you realize that’s what that conversation’s more of. It doubles up with what’s happening in the film as well. It’s just a very genius way that my brother realized, to sort of put those things in the film.
But – everything is sacrifice, just pray that you don’t sacrifice the wrong thing. My brother became a father during the process of the film, equally understanding this idea of provision, this idea of being present for a partner, for a child, for a group of children. In the way society is framed – maybe in the current world we’re in, we’re moving away from these antiquated ideas – but there’s certainly a lot of conservative and traditional values that still believe that a man’s role is to provide for the family, and in some instances, maybe the woman isn’t supposed to work. And certainly we still have a lot of those conservative ideas in Africa, across the continent. I think with generations, we’re moving to a place of more equity and understanding.
But I think that level of pressure on someone can be the making or the breaking of them. Making in terms of yeah, there’s a provision for the family, breaking of them that they don’t get to spend that quality time with the people they love and care about. It’s kind of weighing up that as a sacrifice – what are we doing to fathers by keeping them away from these precious moments in their lives and their partners’ lives? What are we doing to children by not having those fathers present and not having the fullness of understanding of those relationships? And then boiling it down to men – because I know that daughters and fathers have a difficult relationship – but at least women have an outlet to being emotional. Whereas, boys often are not afforded that aspect of their humanity, to be a lot more emotional and a bit more empathetic as to why they feel certain things.
Our film doesn’t answer these questions. It just presents nuances to saying these things are present. It’s just a lot more food for thought. I think my favorite films are the ones that make me go away and ask more questions. That’s certainly what we were attempting to do with this film, is just create more nuance around African fathers and this idea of absence, create more empathy for the choices they have to make, and create more conversation about how we are as society and community moving forward.
“My Father’s Shadow” opens at the Tara Theatre on March 20.