Akinola Davies Jr. talks to Kuyili Karthik about My Father’s Shadow, which has just won the Camera d’Or Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival and is the first Nigerian film to be nominated at Cannes. His debut feature tells the story of two young brothers, Akin and Remi, who spend a day with their estranged father, Folarin, in Lagos, Nigeria. It’s set against the backdrop of political conflict in 1993, based on Akinola and Wale Davies’ own memories as brothers growing up in Lagos having lost their father. Akinola Davies Jr. discusses his namesake, mythologies of grief, how he made Lagos feel so nostalgic and real, and how his background in music videos and fashion influenced My Father’s Shadow.
Kuyili Karthik: Thank you so much for joining today!
Akinola Davies Jr: It’s a pleasure, thanks for having me.
KK: I wanted to start by asking you about your name, Akinola Davies Jr. and your namesake. Why is it important for you to bear the name Akinola and the title Jr.?
AD: It’s a real funny story. In all my ultrasounds, I was a girl. My parents, in their infinite wisdom, only had girls’ names for me prepared, and then I was about four weeks premature — I was meant to be a Gemini, but I forced myself into being a Taurus. I was obviously born a boy, wrapped in pink and loads of girls clothing. My father, Akinola Senior, decided to name me after him. I was the fourth child and the third boy. My mum was like: “There’s no chance, you should have named the first son after you” because that’s generally how it works. They argued and argued, and ultimately, my maternal grandmother said “Just let the man name his son. There’s probably a reason”. Within 20 months, my father passed, and then my maternal grandmother said, “See, he left you a replacement. That’s why he named him Akinola Junior”.
KK: Wow. That’s beautiful, and it’s something I can really see explored in My Father’s Shadow with the story of Remi and his namesake.
AD: My mum told me that story on countless occasions throughout my life. Even today, she calls me her young husband. I carry that name specifically for my mum. I recorded loads of conversations with my mum, and I asked her if she’s ever dreamt about my dad. She said yes, only once. In that dream, we were on holiday and my older siblings were playing in a pool, and me and my brother were on a little deck chair with her. She looks across the pool and she sees this guy in resplendent white, looking incredible, and she realizes it’s my dad. He walks over and sits with my mother, he strokes her on the back, and says to her: “Kemi, everything’s going to be okay. I’m really, really sorry. Everything’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.” He goes and plays with the kids, she gets up and turns around and he’s not there anymore. To be someone from an indigenous place, to be African, these are the kind of stories that we were encased with growing up.
KK: That’s really beautiful, to see these mythologies and prophecies play out in real life and in the movie — one of the brothers is also called Akinola.
AD: Akinola means brave and wealthy in Yoruba. I’m a Taurus, a bull, I like taking risks. ‘Wealth’ means going out into the world and acquiring knowledge and kinship and solidarity, learning people’s stories to make something for my community back home. That’s also who my father was. He was a community builder. His friends used to call him Brother Akin. Because I’m the only Akinola left, I decided to add Junior to my name to nod to the fact that there was one before me.
KK: So, Lagos really feels like a character in the movie. It has this duality; it’s colourful and vibrant and nostalgic, and then it’s dark and silhouetted. When you went back to Lagos to film, was there a sense of loss that the Lagos of your childhood had disappeared? Coming back as an adult, how did you stay faithful to that childlike wonder?
AD: I go back to Nigeria often. As someone who grew up there and left quite young at 12 or 13, I romanticise the hell out of everything. I’m very sensitive to the rhythms and the pace that the city conjures. My friends from around the world get bored of me saying it, but Lagos is a place unlike no other — it has that real duality. It has a heavy sort of humidity, really hot, and these quite opaque gray skies. In some periods, intense rainfalls. The city has an energy, it pulses. Someone sent me this thing the other day: from space you can see that the Earth pulses like it has a heartbeat, and Lagos definitely has that feeling. It’s an extreme place. It can go from complete serenity to total chaos in the blink of an eye. When you grow up in a place like that, your survival instincts are maximised: it’s like I can sniff danger out hundreds of meters away. It makes you hyper aware, for good and for bad. It’s a really giving city for all the infliction that humans have put on it. It’s a spiritual place, filled with people who are on polar extremes, but are really generous.
KK: Those shots navigating the streets of the city really capture that energy. How much of the sets and costumes were your creation, and how hard was it to make sure that modern-day Lagos looked like 1993?
AD: My costume designer, PC Williams, is half Nigerian and Guyanese and she said “It’s gonna look like I didn’t do anything, because you’ve managed to capture it so well”. But all the details of filmmaking went into the film. In Lagos, we have the gift and the curse of being a city that looks towards the Global North, wanting to be this tech and industrial hub. So we embrace technology, we fiend off [sic] it. So in that sense, it was quite difficult because of neon signs and digital things — everything is LED. Even the torches in the car in the scenes at the end were LEDs, so we had to put something over them in the grade. Everyone has smartphones and we really had to hide stuff like that.
One of my favorite shots is the sequence going into Lagos and there’s these kids in the lagoon swimming on logs, and they’ve made this outside bath — all that stuff was real. We didn’t have to impose on anything. We just went out the day after we wrapped and went to some high rises and shot a lot of stuff. From a distance, it still feels like the Lagos I grew up in. When you get closer, you see little intricacies that changed, like the ice cream packaging wasn’t what I remembered growing up. But we couldn’t fabricate that, so we just had to go with what was there. It took a lot of detail in every department, our design department are incredible legends.
KK: My Father’s Shadow won The Special Mention of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, congratulations! The camerawork was brilliant and felt really modern at times, but how did you keep that nostalgic feel?
AD: My cinematographer is Jermaine Edwards. It’s his first feature, and he did an incredible job. Shooting on Super 16 did a massive service for us. Other than the fact that I love the pace of film and celluloid, I think it captured something timeless. If we had shot digital and had to doctor it, we may have lost a certain level of nostalgia and texture. I have to shout out the guys at Kodak for being absolute legends and bearing with us in the crazy logistical feat of getting film in and out of Nigeria.
KK: The visuals, the colour and the patterns and the costume reminded me of your work as Crack Stevens directing the music video for Blood Orange’s Charcoal Baby, which I loved. How did your past in music video direction and fashion editorials and commercial direction influence My Father’s Shadow?
AD: I’m obsessed with technicians, anyone who’s really good at what they do, because they have a certain level of passion and obsession for their craft. Music is something that seduced me. I always wanted to make films but got seduced into music because my favourite art is just emotive. I’m always looking for that aspect of heart — that’s the only way I know to describe it — someone with a lot of heart, who wears their heart on their sleeve no matter what. That’s the redeeming quality I find in music. For My Father’s Shadow, we worked with Duval Timothy, and it’s his first score of a movie ever.We tried to get something that felt melancholic but also positive and uplifting, but could easily quickly become a little rotten or a little out of tune.
My background in fashion exposed me to collaborators. You can tell a story with just the hair. You can tell a story with colour theory. You can tell a story with costume. You can tell a story with makeup. You won’t be able to tell, but there’s quite a bit of prosthetic work on some of our characters. We put tribal marks in the film because we want to represent part of Nigerian culture that’s dying — scarification is becoming rarer and rarer because of globalisation and people from different cultures don’t think it looks aesthetically beautiful. Putting Pidgin English and putting Yoruba in the film was also really important to us. These aspects of our culture we’re trying to celebrate are very prevalent and present, and we don’t need to dumb them down to show ourselves to the world. Take Afrobeats, for example: a lot of it has Nigerian slang, and the world is still dancing. I think that can equally work for cinema and the way we tell stories.
KK: Definitely. You accord a lot of importance to Nollywood and celebrate it, because it’s a sign of self–determination, almost, that it’s a culture making their own stories for themselves. So, who were some Nigerian contemporaries that influenced you?
AD: There’s Lionheart by Genevieve Nnaji, who’s a legend in Nollywood. That being the Nigerian entry to the Oscars a few years ago really captivated my imagination. I’m more in the school of Ousmane Sembène, one of my favourite filmmakers of all time. I’m in the camps of Mati Diop, Rungano Nyoni. I’ve been looking up to them for the last few years, going “This is someone who grew up in Nigeria but moved to the UK.” I was like, well, I can’t claim 100% to be of a certain thing, and I can’t claim this other thing, so I need to exist in the middle, right? So actually, the filmmakers that straddle those two things are the ones that really appeal to me. Recently again, there was Eyimofe, All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White, Mami Wata, all those films are in my family tree. We’re all cousins. We’re all related. My film exists because of those films. We’re a collective of African filmmakers trying to have some self-determination.
KK: I loved the relationship between the brothers Akinola and Remi in the movie. One’s in charge, the other’s older, they’re fighting over toys, and it’s really playful and dynamic. How did the dynamic of you and screenwriter Wale Davies, working as brothers, play out in production?
AD: We have a lot of creative unity in the way me and my brother work. As men, we can either succumb to ego or we can move past it and try and find what is more, the commonality. We know each other’s strengths. My brother is pen to page. He writes, he’s the dialogue, he’s the characters. I’m the ideas. I co-wrote with him by giving him images or telling him how deep we should go into the specifics of a scene — what the kids are seeing or how they’re playing. We do have disagreements, but they’re mainly framed as a debate, trying not to be blindsided, trying to get as much purchase out of an idea as possible.
So we’re not just kind of an echo chamber of ourselves, I tried to get loads of women to read the script. It’s quite male heavy, but there is a lot of female presence within the film. Obviously I’m a man, so I can’t say the gaze is female-led — but there’s a lot of looking around. There’s a lot of pause for contemplation, nuance, and body language. All the intimacy within that, I’d attribute to speaking to women and women in our lives. Our development team are all women. Our producers are all women.
The gift of being brothers is that we can cut straight through a lot of small talk. I love my brother and I’ve idolized him for a lot of my life. Spending time together is what the experience of being alive is to me; making films is just another trick for us to spend more time together.
KK: You have a really strong, cool visual aesthetic that comes across in all your work. Stuff with light and shadow and silhouettes. What inspirations are behind that?
AD: Roy DeCarava was quite a big influence. My gaffer on Lizard, Christian Epps, was a big influence. I love the work of Alex Webb. I love too many things today, I’m a bit of a sponge. Ultimately, I’m just inspired by my friends and family. I’m inspired by the outside world. Even now I live in a small apartment but I have a massive window looking out on the street, and I just watch people go back and forth, people congregating in the park in front of me. It’s free TV, watching the world. We’d already shot the film when I watched Perfect Day by Wim Wenders, but that observation of nature. I love Japanese cinema. I love [Toyomichi] Kurita, he’s probably one of my favorite filmmakers. Sometimes you just have to remember that you don’t have to look for massive external validation. You can just look for that in those around you. My mother, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, they’re all in the credits of the film, and they’re a huge influence.
KK: Do you have a favourite city and is there a city you’d like to work in?
AD: That is a controversial question. There’s a lot of cities that make up My Father’s Shadow. Obviously Lagos is, in terms of creating work, my favorite city. I would say London and Paris, two cities filled with loads of diaspora and creatives, as well as Los Angeles. Mexico City just has this kind of presence. Omar Guzman, my editor, is Mexican — one of the unsung heroes of My Father’s Shadow, an incredible, incredible, incredible artist and such an experienced hand. Lila Avilés is one of my inspirations. She made a film called Totém and that’s where I found Omar, because he edited it. She’s a masterful filmmaker and I was lucky enough to meet her when I was in Mexico earlier this year.
KK: My Father’s Shadow is showing at the Sydney Film Festival really soon. How do you feel about being in this part of the world?
AD: I’m really excited to be in Sydney for the first time, just to meet other filmmakers and meet audiences and learn about Australian culture and Aboriginal culture. I have synergy with Australia, although I’ve never been, but Lizard won Best Short Film at Melbourne, so I think maybe, you guys might like my film!
KK: For sure! Thank you so much for your time, and I’m really looking forward to watching My Father’s Shadow again at Sydney Film Festival.
AD: Thank you so much, really appreciate you.
