My Father’s Shadow

Dad guides the boys through a busy market

Two boys hang out with their dad for the day in My Father’s Shadow, an enormously artful film using pace and rhythm, light, shade and colour as its warp and weft. Or, if you prefer a more thematic description, a warm and intimate film about memory and the family bond. Akinola Davies made it and he says it’s about a day he and his brother Wale – who wrote it – spent with their dad when they were growing up in Nigeria. Or a half-remembered day, half-imagined even. Big, adult dad and two little village boys in awe as he takes them with him on a trip into big-city Lagos – they weren’t expecting … Read more

His House

Rial screaming

Let’s do a refugee drama, which no one wants to watch, as a haunted house movie, which everyone does. That’s the thinking behind His House, a canny mix of genres from writer/director Remi Weekes in his feature debut, which adds a further layer of originality by adding all sorts of weird African supernatural juju to the mix. This clever and atmospheric amalgam kicks off with a pair of refugees from the war in South Sudan being shown a house on a housing estate in shithole Britain. It’s loads better than the detention centre and so Bol (Sope Dirisu) and his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) cannot believe their luck. They move straight in. Of … Read more