Everything is sacrifice. You just have to pray you don’t sacrifice the wrong thing. -Folarin
My Father’s Shadow is Akinola Davies Jr.’s debut feature, and the first Nigerian film selected for Cannes’ official programme. It is set over a single day in 1993, as Nigeria waits on an election result. Two boys, Remi and Akin, haven’t seen their father in months. Then he turns up, and takes them with him to Lagos. The film never tells us everything he knows, and it never lets us stop watching him.
We began our film club theme, Family, but not as you know it, with this one. A full living room in Muyenga. By the credits, nobody was in a hurry— in true Aftersun style.
Then one Aftersunette said it: what if he was a ghost all along?
The room split open. The case for it was strong. A father who arrives like an apparition and moves through the day half in this world. A promise to meet in dreams that keeps coming back. A film that lets the living and the dead drift close enough to blur. Some of us were convinced and started rebuilding scenes around the idea. Others held their ground: he is only a man, tired and afraid, and that is the harder thing to sit with.
Sacrifice kept pulling us back. In 1993 Lagos, money is thin and the country is straining, and a man who wants a better future for his sons has to pay for it somewhere. For this father, the price is time. He is absent from his boys’ lives because of what he’s trying to build for them. So perhaps the ghost reading isn’t a twist at all. Perhaps it’s what sacrifice looks like from a child’s side: a parent who is always almost there, a shadow where a person should be.
What the ghost theory kept circling back to was something quieter. The boys get one day with him. That’s all, and it is enough to shape them for life. Several of us spoke about what it means to be present: how often we are in a room and somewhere else entirely, how easily we assume the people we love will be there tomorrow. The film doesn’t explain its father. It lets him be loved anyway. Almost as the film isn’t asking us to understand him. It’s asking us to notice him while he’s here.
In truth, some people never fully explain themselves. Some of our Aftersunettes knew something about that: fathers who work far away, families held together by phone calls and dreams, love that shows up in small gestures and long absences.
Family isn’t always the one that looks right from outside. Sometimes it’s whoever you choose to be present for.
Take Care.
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