Q2 2026 · Roll Call Africa Rising Watchlist™
The Rising Watchlist™ is not a list of talented people. It is a list of people whose trajectory, in the past twelve to eighteen months, has crossed a specific threshold — where creative recognition and institutional positioning arrive simultaneously in a way that marks a permanent shift. Akinola Davies Jr. crossed that threshold in 2025 and has not stopped.
My Father’s Shadow — his debut feature, co-written with his brother Wale Davies, shot on 16mm film in Lagos, telling the story of two boys spending a single day with their estranged father on the day of Nigeria’s annulled 1993 election — made history as the first Nigerian film selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s official selection. It won the Caméra d’Or Special Mention in Un Certain Regard. It was selected as the UK’s official submission for the 98th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category. It won Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards. It took two Gotham Awards — Best Breakthrough Director and Best Lead Performance. It earned a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut. MUBI acquired distribution for the UK, Ireland, North America, and Turkey. It holds 98% on Rotten Tomatoes from 61 critics, with the critical consensus reading: the film “casts a highly promising light on feature-debut director Akinola Davies’ future.”
Davies was born in London, raised between there and Lagos and the United States. He is Yoruba. He began his career assisting photographers and filmmakers, made music videos and commercials for Gucci, Kenzo, and Louis Vuitton, and built the visual intelligence that saturates every frame of My Father’s Shadow across a decade of commercial work before the short film Lizard — shot on a trip to Nigeria, inspired by his childhood — won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2021. The feature followed four years later. The wait was not delay. It was the film being made correctly, on 16mm, in Lagos, exactly as he intended it.
What places him on this list at Q2 2026 is not the debut. Brilliant debuts appear, receive their recognition, and the filmmaker either builds or doesn’t. The signal RollCallAfrica is watching is everything around the debut: the institutional relationships now established, the distribution pipeline in place through MUBI, the BAFTA Breakthrough Brits 2025 recognition that puts him inside the British industry’s forward-looking list. The diaspora audience for My Father’s Shadow — the audiences in London and New York who watched a film about Lagos and their fathers and 1993 and wept — is a commercial constituency. That constituency will show up for his second film.
What the second film is, when it arrives, is the moment this Watchlist entry gets validated or revised. RollCallAfrica expects validation.
Territory: Nigeria / UK · Role: Director, Writer · Watch for: Second feature announcement, 2026–2027
