Joe Blog

The 13th European Film Festival South Africa is here. Over 10 days across 4 cities, audiences will have the opportunity to see some of the best films in current European cinema, fresh from Cannes, Venice, Berlin and beyond. Featuring award-winning films by giants of European cinema alongside bold new voices and starring Europe’s biggest names: this year’s films follow families of all kinds – biological, chosen, broken, rebuilding – fighting to hold together and carve out a future against everything working to pull them apart.
ALL FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS WILL BE SCREENED WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.
SEE THE FULL BIOSCOPE PROGRAM HERE
My Father’s Shadow (UK)
Directed by Akinola Davies Jr. Drama. 1hrs 34mins.
On a sweltering summer day in the countryside outside Lagos, in June 1993, bored brothers Remi and Akin are pleasantly surprised to see their usually absent father Folarin at home and even more surprised when he tells them to get dressed and accompany him on an urgent trip to Lagos. As the boys and their father make the journey to the city, with tensions brewing over the results of the general election, they learn unnerving things about their father and his life past and present and find themselves in the middle of what will later be remembered as one of the most significant political moments in the history of the country, just trying to get back to their mother and home. Poetically realized with haunting imagery and bustling, vivid, angry life it’s a deeply personal film that’s a tribute not only to its creators’ own father but to all parents who daily face the struggles to keep their families alive and together at all costs in spite of the broader social and political chaos erupting around them.