Fresh off Cannes win, Akinola imagines future of Nigerian film

Akinola Davies, the director of “My Father’s Shadow,” Nigeria’s first film to win an award at the Cannes film festival, is savouring his return to Lagos, the country’s cultural capital, where the movie was released on Friday.

“I think it’s like a homecoming that’s well deserved,” the British-Nigerian director said in an interview. The film, which won the Special Mention for the Camera D’Or, is an intimate portrayal of a father (Sope Dirisu) and his two sons (Godwin and Chibuike Egbo), attempting to claim back pay they’re owed.

Set in Lagos on June 24, 1993, the city seems ready to explode: it’s the day that strongman general Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida annuls the results of the presidential elections, held two weeks earlier and set to finally free the country from military rule. “I hope that they feel it’s an honest portrayal of what it is like to be Nigerian and the sort of hurdles that life kind of throws at you,” Davies, 40, said ahead of the film’s premiere on Thursday evening. His brother, Wale, who co-wrote the film, remembers the day vividly. It was a defining moment in the country’s trajectory — and at the same time, in a nation where the median age is 19, is for many confined to history books or family lore. “It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to mass trauma, actually, where everybody was very disappointed,” he said.

“It felt like the idea that a country owes something to its citizens, some sort of unspoken contract was broken.” Nigeria eventually returned to civilian rule in 1999. But the family struggles portrayed in the film are likely to resonate 26 years later, as the country grinds through a cost-of-living crisis under President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms. “There’s still a want and the hope for the country to achieve its potential,” Akinola Davies said.

Speaking after the premiere, held at a Lagos cinema, Segun Odunuge said it “told the story of my family”. The 55-year-old engineer remembers the street brawls and burning cars of June 24, “and this movie depicted it,” he said. “It was marvellous.” Florence Imo, a 26-year-old director, wasn’t yet born when the country’s hopes were dashed that day, but said the “iconic” film “made me more curious about what happened”.

Wale Davies moved to Ireland in his youth, but now lives mostly in Lagos, where he works in the music industry, including as the manager for music star Tems. Akinola, meanwhile, lives in London, though he considers Lagos his “spiritual home”. The win at Cannes for Akinola’s first feature-length film also marked the first time a Nigerian film had been screened at the festival. It was a breakthrough for Nigeria’s Nollywood, known for its success locally and among the diaspora even as it has long been written off by outsiders.

Those in the sprawling industry — Nollywood is second only to India’s Bollywood in the sheer number of films pumped out each year — acknowledge that it tends towards the commercial, churning out low-budget dramas at a frenetic pace that nonetheless are a hit with domestic audiences.

“This is not the kind of movie that you see all the time here in Nigeria,” said Nicolette Ndigwe, a 33-year-old director.

“My Father’s Shadow” bucked the industry’s “fear of not having the market for arthouse films”, she said, calling it “a breath of fresh air”.

The Davies brothers might relish being the “awkward cousins” of Nollywood, “in the corner of the room that are telling different stories”, Wale said — but their success couldn’t have come without it. “Ninety per cent of everyone on set are people that work in Nollywood,” he said of the production for “My Father’s Shadow”. “We’re all cut from the same cloth,” he said. “We are honoured to actually be mentioned in the same breath as all of them.”

After hitting the major film festivals in Cannes, Toronto and Sydney, “My Father’s Shadow” is set to continue on the worldwide circuit, at festivals in Morocco, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Asia. The brothers have a handful of ideas for what’s next spinning around in their heads — all with Nigeria in mind.

Agence France-Presse