My Father's Shadow
Written by the director and his older brother Wade and fuelled with their childhood memories, the result is touching, contemplative and unsettling – a film with the gentle impressionist gaze of Moonlight, the hard-scrabble edge of Bicycle Thieves, and a fourth-wall-breaking daring all of its own.
My Father's Shadow is also coming-of-age story – an unusual one for focusing as much on its struggling but well-intentioned dad, Folarin (Gangs of London 's Sope Dirisu), striving to be a better man, as his two boys, 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and eight-year-old Akin (Godwin Egbo).
It's 1993 and Nigeria has gone to the polls to elect a new president. Folarin hopes it will be social democrat MKO Abiola, but as he travels with his sons into Lagos, word spreads of a spate of killings by a military regime looking to cling to power. The country is divided. Petrol is scarce. Tension throbs from the frame. 'Nigeria needs discipline,' mutters a passenger on their bus ride into the city, advocating for the jackbooted junta to come.
Davies Jr's bold debut speaks with a murmur and beats like a drum
Into this combustible mix, Folarin takes the two eager boys, hoping to claim the pay packet his employer has been denying him. Their split gazes sends cinematographer Jermaine Edwards's inquisitive camera off in different directions: the boys upwards to skies dotted with soaring birds; their dad to truckloads of passing soldiers with cold gazes and loaded rifles. A harrowing visit to the seaside, backdropped, in a dystopian touch, by a beached freighter, illustrates the fine balance between exposing the boys to the world and protecting them from it.
The two young actors are both naturals as the boys bicker over their favourite WWE wrestlers, refuse to share ice-cream money and wrap their heads around the hubbub of the city. Dirisu is simmering and sensitive as a man who surfs the line between deadbeat dad and safe harbour.
They're the heart of a film that sometimes speaks with a murmur and sometimes beats like a drum. There's been many movies made by Nollywood, the country's prodigious film industry, but somehow this is the first Nigerian movie to be selected to play at Cannes. On this evidence, the Davies brothers will be back.
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Spectator
33 minutes ago
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The Herald Scotland
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Spectator
an hour ago
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A new Beethoven cycle to keep
Grade: C In the 1990s the young Italian pianist Giovanni Bellucci gave us a reading of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata whose thrilling athleticism bore comparison with those of Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen. A few years later Bellucci began a complete cycle of the piano sonatas – but, rather than include his existing Hammerklavier, he produced a version that was in keeping with the style of the cycle: deliberately perverse, reinterpreting (that is, ignoring) the composer's precise instructions in the score. Only now has Bellucci finished the cycle, explaining in his pretentious liner notes that he was held up by his meditations on Beethoven's true intentions. So, for example, the first movement of the Moonlight is as slathered in sustaining pedal as Debussy's submerged cathedral. Every sonata goes through the wringer, and generally speaking the more modest the piece the more grotesque the results: the delicious Vivace finale of the miniature Opus 79 sonata sounds as if it is being parodied by Satie. But I'm not complaining. There are dozens of meticulous cycles of Beethoven's New Testament of the keyboard out there. Bellucci isn't the only pianist to play eccentric games with the music, but among the mavericks I can't think of another whose technique is so formidable; he still has the chops to highlight individual lines in the midst of polyphonic storms, and if the results run counter to Beethoven's markings – well, is it really a hanging offence? This one's a keeper, then, albeit one you might want to hide, along with Glenn Gould's Mozart piano sonatas, from your more fastidious music-loving friends.
