Three films about fatherhood during social upheaval to screen in South Africa
Three films about fatherhood, family ties and the search for belonging amid social and political instability will be screened at the 13th European Film Festival in South Africa, to be held from September 17 to 27, 2026. The programme includes Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland and Tiago Guedes’ Aquí.
As Daily Maverick reports, the festival’s theme is the families people are born into, the families they create, and the stories and ties that shape identity. The programme covers different models of family life, while these three films are united by their reflection on the father’s role during periods of instability.
A family story in Nigeria
My Father’s Shadow is set in Nigeria in the 1990s. The film tells the story of two brothers who spend a day in Lagos with their estranged father. He seeks to obtain long-unpaid wages from his boss. The family journey unfolds against the backdrop of the political crisis linked to Nigeria’s 1993 election.
The screenplay was written by director Akinola Davies Jr. and his brother Wale Davies. The film is inspired by their own experience of growing up without a father and addresses the theme of intergenerational grief.
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Post-war Germany and the search for home
In Fatherland, the action moves to Germany in 1949. Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann travels through the devastated country with his adult daughter Erika after 16 years of exile in the United States. The film draws a parallel between a divided state and a family that is also experiencing an internal rupture and trying to define what home means to it.
A family without blood ties
Aquí, an adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy, unfolds in a space between reality and myth. During an unnamed transition to a “new life,” a boy named David is separated from his mother, and a man named Simón finds him and eventually becomes a father to him. The film focuses on family ties beyond blood relation: Simón provides the child with shelter, answers his questions and finds him a foster mother.
Separately, the publication cites data from the third State of South Africa’s Fathers report, published in 2024: in 2023, 35.6% of South African children lived in the same household as their biological fathers, while 40.3% lived with men who were not their biological fathers.
