Akinola Davies Jr. was twenty months old when his father died. His brother Wale, who wrote the script, was four. Between them, they have made a film about a man neither of them can remember. Rather than hide that memory gap, they have built the film around it.

What you are watching, for much of My Father’s Shadow, is not a childhood being remembered but a father being invented: assembled from family stories and from later visits to Lagos by the brothers.

Davies has no interest in recovering the past neatly. The film moves between what the boys see and what they seem to remember seeing, without signalling which is which. Sudden bursts of images punctuate the narrative at intervals, merging earlier and later moments into each other the way actual memory does. You are not watching the past. You are watching two brothers try to find it, which is a different thing entirely, and more interesting.

As the film begins, we are shown older versions of the brothers alone at home, then we see their father, Folarin, played by Șopé Dìrisù, arrive home. He is preparing to leave again for Lagos, where he works, when the boys start grumbling, and Folarin decides to take them along.

The story takes place across a single day in Lagos, June 1993. The boys, eleven and eight, have never seen Lagos before. Folarin grew up there, and as he takes them around on okadas, through bars, past a shuttered amusement park, down to the sea, we see he is also moving through his own past, showing them who he was before he was their father. He tells them how he met their mother. A friend remembers the couple as the neighbourhood’s great romance. Each story adds to a picture of a man they are only beginning to know.

Outside, the country is coming apart. The June 12 election is unravelling in real time. The boys catch it in pieces: headlines glimpsed on the bus, their father’s argument with a pro-regime passenger, the word “massacre” on a front page no one explains to them. When the annulment is announced on a bar television, gunshots follow almost immediately. Folarin moves his sons out of the city. The film simply shows you what the boys see and lets the fear do its work. Davies holds the whole film together through the eyes of children who absorb everything and understand only some of it.

Davies trusts the image. He does not reach for the explanation. Dìrisù’s performance works in the same way. In one of the film’s most exact scenes, a recently widowed friend of Folarin’s reproaches himself at length for how he treated his wife. The camera holds on Folarin’s face for the entire monologue. He says nothing. What the scene is doing is hinting at troubles in his own marriage that the film will never name directly.

By the time the boys board a bus back home, the city behind them, they know more about their father than they did that morning. Not everything. Not the parts he could not say. But enough to have started building something: a person made of stories, of the streets where he came from, of the way he said “stupid people” under his breath when a military truck rolled past. This is what the Davies brothers have been doing, too, for their whole lives, and what the film is about.

What they construct belongs to all three of them: the brothers, the father, the country. All three lost something in 1993. They lost something nearly held, then taken before it could be kept. Davies does not force that connection. He places all three losses in the same frame and steps back. For a Nigerian audience, it will feel less like cinema and more like recognition of the weight carried by a generation raised in the shadow of June 12, by parents who never quite said what it cost them. Folarin is one of those parents. The film is his son’s final understanding of why, who, and what.