The filmmakers behind the history making UK-Nigeria coproduction project, My Father’s Shadow, have said its crew was over 80 percent Nigerian. The film’s director, Akinola Davies Jnr, and one of its producers, Funmbi Ogunbanwo, were speaking to Film Efiko a few days after their project was announced as part of the Cannes Film Festival‘s official selection, a first for Nigeria.
“Over 80% of the crew is Nigerian—it’s specifically around 88%,” said Funmbi Ogunbanwo, who alongside the director and his brother/co-screenwriter Wale Davies, runs Fatherland Productions, the Nigerian production company behind My Father’s Shadow. “We had other Africans from across the continent which pushed the margin to 90% crew from Africa.”
“We had a mix,” she continued. “Some HODs came from the UK but majority of the HODs were from Lagos…We had a Kenyan, we had a Somalian who is US-based. It really was a very collaborative thing.”
The filmmakers said shooting of the film, which is set in 1993’s Nigeria and follows a man navigating his environment with two sons, took place in early 2024 at locations in Ibadan and Lagos. Altogether, they said, shooting the film took 11 weeks, five of which were spent prepping. “Originally it was meant to be a 5-week shoot but it ended up being 6 weeks due to some technical difficulties and [because we had] such a big crew,” said Davies Jnr.
Asked about the challenges encountered during the filmmaking process, Ogunbanwo noted that shooting on any scale in Nigeria can be difficult. “Now imagine shooting a period drama. Now imagine shooting a period drama on this kind of scale. Now imagine having corporate entities and partners who believe in you and trust you. But who you have to show that there’s infrastructure here [in Nigeria] that can take on a project of this scale. We were over like 200 at some point.”
Some of the challenges involved paperwork for film-specific insurance, some involved the relative paucity of equipment, some were about unit movement and logistics. But one was perhaps particularly specific to Nigeria. “When you’re shooting in places where you have to bring your own electricity to power up the whole space,” said Ogunbanwo. “Or you have to call NEPA so that people that have their generator on on the next street can turn off their generator so you have good sound. These are the things we had to do.”
She also touched on the need to bring in certain professionals from outside of the country. “We really believe in growing the industry and the talent,” she said. “But I’m also honest enough and practical enough to know where it does not exist and where we need to leverage our network and our relationship with our partners to bring in some people who have skill and can teach and share knowledge, so that people at home are learning as they are doing the job.”
All of those measures have worked out quite well. So well, indeed that My Father’s Shadow has earned a place in Nigeria’s cinematic history by becoming the first project from the country to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival as part of its official selection. A previous Nigeria coproduction, Newton Aduaka’s 2007 picture, Ezra appeared in Cannes’ Critics’ Week, a parallel section of the festival. Davies Jnr’s film will compete in the Un Certain Regard, the same section of the festival that, last year, crowned Zimbabwean-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni Best Director in a tie with Italy’s Roberto Minervini.
But even as getting into Cannes’ official selection is a heavily coveted honour for many first-time feature filmmakers, Davies Jnr believes his work is not quite fully done. “The real test,” he said, “will be the value of the emotional impression the film makes on people.”
