Breaking Baz: ‘My Father’s Shadow’s Akinola Davies Reunites With Element’s Rachel Dargavel For New Feature ‘Delta Force Six;’ Hot Hostage Thriller Will Shoot In Nigeria’s Oil-Rich Badlands 

EXCLUSIVE: Element Pictures’ Rachel Dargavel, producer of Akinola Davies’s My Father’s Shadow, Nigeria’s first Cannes entry, tells Deadline that she and the filmmaker are in early development for his sophomore feature, Delta Force Six, which will be filmed on locations in the vast southern region of the West African nation.

The producer is eager to get the film rolling within two years. “You know how hard it is to get a second feature up and away and to make it great. And many people fall on the second feature. And I want for us to not be those people,” she insists.

Delta Force Six, a step up in terms of vision and budget, is being written by Davies and Wale, his Lagos-based sibling (together they penned the screenplay for their freshman hit), and is set in the oil-rich Niger Delta badlands where rebels kidnap foreign workers and sabotage pipelines.

The film, both a thriller and a morality tale, is being developed by Dargavel at Element and will explore the conflict between local militia and oil executives while also focusing on the journalists who report on them. The landscape has been ravaged, Dargavel explains, “by the need for oil, or the greed for oil, whichever way you look at it.”

My Father’s Shadow, which will play at the BFI London Film Festival in the fall, screened in Un Certain Regard, becoming one of the most discussed films in the 2025 selection. Even Nicole Kidman had gotten wind of it and at one point considered rolling up to the film’s rollicking post-premiere party on the beach with me in tow, but, alas, the Oscar winner was unable to break away from an official function. Turned out to be the party of Cannes.

During the festival’s closing ceremony, Camera d’or jury president, the director Alice Rohrwacher (La Chimera, Happy as Lazzaro), announced a “Special Mention” for My Father’s Shadow. It was marked by an unforgettable moment. Davies arose from his seat in the Grand Lumière, his handsomely bleached hair making him immediately apparent amidst the black-tie crowd.

He was already being courted by the likes of Plan B, and others who wanted to be in the business of tying up his second movie. Davies says everything has to go through Raxana Adle, his longtime rep at Lark Management, and Dargavel.

There’s no reason, Dargavel tells us, why Delta Force Six and Davies’s future features can’t be supported at Element in the same way that Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, the company’s founders and top executives, stepped up to produce many of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films.

 “Element are committed to storytelling and they’re committed to talent and nurturing talent and growing talent,” Dargavel says with passion during an interview recently over breakfast at the Dean Street Townhouse in Soho. I was keen to know how her career in pictures began, how she became one of the industry’s leading lights, and why Nigeria, in both senses of the word, has become one of the hottest places to make movies, even though the country’s movie production infrastructure is relatively nascent.

 “It’s a serious business having taken on a responsibility of truly being someone’s producer,” Dargavel states. “You are not just in it for the money. It’s like you’re in it because you care about the person, you care about the films that they’re making… I’m committed to making Akinola’s next film and making it a success …and making it not too slowly to have  people go, ‘Oh, what happened to that guy that made that very promising film My Father’s Shadow?’ We know how the industry works,” she sighs.

Good that the British and Nigerian film industry can hang on to him, I say. Dargnavel nods. ”Akinola is a very talented director and he tells stories with conviction. That’s a quality that not every director has: telling stories that resonate.”

I mention the utter simplicity of an early scene in My Father’s Shadow where the two brothers central to the story, played by youngsters Godwin Egbo and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, squabble over the size of their potions of breakfast cereal, while they await the arrival of their father, a superb Sopé Dìrísù (His House, Gangs of London, Slow Horses).

“Maybe it doesn’t resonate with everybody in terms of the setting,” Dargavel cautions, ”but everyone who’s got a sibling or has even seen siblings argue, understands that dynamic…” 

Dargavel laughs and says that filming in Nigeria is not “for the faint-hearted”, but she’s pleased to be returning there “with Akinola, Wale and Funmbi,” the latter name being that of Lagos-based Funmbi Ogunbanwo, who produced the film with Dargavel and who is also an executive at Wale Davies’s Fatherland Productions, a music video and commercials producing house.

Ogunbanwo and Dargavel met during the filming in Lagos on Akinola Davies’s BBC Film-backed short Lizard, and Dargavel had been impressed with the Nigerian woman’s persistence in getting things done.

But she had to woo her because Ogunbanwo hadn’t been sure that she wanted to remain in the industry. “I can hold your hand through it,” Dargavel remembers telling her. ”And all the things that I’ve learned across the years, I can help bring that to Nigeria. But I don’t know Nigeria. I don’t live there. You do,” she recalls saying. “In the same way that  I’ve had people throughout my career support me,” she wanted to do the same for Ogunbanwo.

There are many outsiders who want to work in Nigeria now. Others have made films there over the years, think of Half of a Yellow Sun with Thandiwe Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor, for instance. But there’s undoubtedly renewed interest because of Akinola and Wale Davies. Their voice has a vibe that travels further.

However, Dargavel warns that the relationships between foreigners and Nigerians “just can’t be business and transactional.” Continuing her point, she suggests that there must be a real commitment to “why you want to tell the story there.”

Her time in Lagos on My Father’s Shadow was spent on set. She ate the local food. After all, “Lagos is a cosmopolitan city. That side of Lagos, going to restaurants, is pretty easy, really. Working there is different. The heat and the traffic; insurance was incredibly complicated when we were there; the currency was moving all over the place. We locked in a rate, which had doubled by the time we’d left.”

Ogunbanwo had to renegotiate a locked-in contract at the bank, which, says Dargavel, eventually “went in our favor.”

Some 13 international HoDs, from South Africa, the UK and the US, joined the production in Lagos, partnering with Nigerians who shared the same disciplines. Various management and production account systems that the Nigerian team had never worked on before were installed, which required training across all of the departments. Dargavel’s eager to work with many of the same crew Nigerian crew members because they worked “so incredibly hard. They just didn’t stop.”

Lucy Drury, one of the co-producers, who’d been with  Dargavel at Potboiler, and is also now at Element, “was absolutely integral,” says Dargavel. The film was primarily financed out of the UK with major support early on from BBC Film and, later on, from the BFI. In fact, Dargavel has developed close ties with the admirable Eva Yates at BBC Film and the BFI’s remarkable Ama Ampadu. There was no Nigerian funding.

Originally, Dargavel developed My Father’s Shadow “at my own company” Cry Baby, and was thrilled when Element agreed to throw their hat in. She calls Cry Baby “a place where I’m incubating my own projects as a producer because I wanted to be developing projects that were owned by me, that I’d put my own time and investment into.”

Her bread and butter, she adds, comes from her producing role at Element, which she describes as a “fantastic company to work at” adding that Element were “very excited about Akinola,” and more than happy to support her as a producer “in the next bit of my career.” 

She knew Lagos a little from when Potboiler’s Andrea Calderwood and Gail Egan sent her there on a recce for the HBO limited series based on Americanah, the adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s bestseller. HBO later decided not to proceed with Americanah. Maybe that’ll get going again?

Whilst Dargavel was in the neighbourhood, as it were, the producer, who’d already befriended Akinola Davies after discovering his music videos, produced his 18-minute film Lizard there, which went on to win the  2021 Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize. Lizard’s success further cemented her ties to Davies and Ogunbanwo at Fatherland and with Eva Yates, who championed the short.

Dargavel remembers the searing Lagos humidity hitting her as she travelled around the city. “Your senses are overwhelmed, but it doesn’t affect me. I didn’t find it impossible. I just thought, ‘Okay, we’ve got to just really pull together here, and I need to use the experience that I’ve culminated over all these years,’” she says.

Lizard was shot in one location at a large church complex. The shoot went well if you don’t count the day local authorities switched the date of a city-wide marathon that meant the closure of a key bridge, which would make it impossible for local crew and background artists to get to the set. The solution was to set up bunks on site for all concerned to ensure filming could continue with all present and correct.

On the back of Lizard, Dargavel and Akinola met with Yates to discuss the My Father’s Shadow project. It’d been written by Wale Davies as a short film several years before. After reading it, they all decided to rework it as a feature. Dargnavel’s view is that for a first feature, indeed for any movie: “You need to know the story and why you’re telling it.”

There’s added, unnecessary pressure if you go in on your first film “making something about which you’ve got no clue about. My Father’s Shadow is inherently their story. It’s a film that has elements of their late father in it, plus the movie’s also about Nigeria,” she explains while observing that during development another layer was added so that the story of a father and his two young sons journeying to Lagos would be set against the backdrop of civil unrest over the the country’s controversial, June 12th, 1993 presidential election.

Dargavel was raised in Matlock, on the River Derwent, in Derbyshire. Later, during her time at Nottingham University, she used her student loan to buy a digital video camera and spent three years filming ”anyone, anything, and everybody.” She and a burgeoning filmmaker joined forces to shoot music videos and shorts, although she now concedes that it was more “bodies on screen” rather than actual filmmaking.

Turns out it was time well spent. Without realising it, she was kinda producing.

Post university, she put her time, as she puts it, ”in the trenches as crew,” working as a runner, 3rd AD, while at night she kept her hand in the music video and short film world.

Around the same time, she saw Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes and discovered that it was filmed at  Riber Castle, a spit away from her hometown. “All of a sudden something clicked for me,” she says. Seeing a landscape that she was intimately familiar with on a big screen was hugely meaningful.  “You can tell these fantastic stories in any environment,” everything local is universal, she realized — a point that hit home when she was in Nigeria shooting My Father’s Shadow. 

The now defunct EM Media fund had a little pot of money for films being shot in the East Midlands region through which low-budget movies such as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Branson, Paul King’s Bunny and the Bull, and This is England were co-financed. It’s how Dargavel met producer Tristan Goligher (Lean on Pete, 45 Years), who hired her to line produce Andrew Haigh’s (All of Us Strangers) early feature Weekend and to produce Harry Wootliff’s debut feature Only You, starring a youthful Josh O’Connor.

“So we were all sort of kicking around in Nottingham at that time and trying to understand what stories we wanted to tell,” she recalls.

Soon after she was juggling between making the music videos, producing commercials while also now working for director Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) and producer Ken Marshall (Filth) at their Steel Mill Pictures company helping them produce Martin Radich’s Norfolk, Williams’ Unfinished Song (released as Song for Marion in the UK), with Vanessa Redgrave and Gemma Arterton, and Jon S. Baird’s Filth with James McAvoy and Imogen Poots

Moving down to London, one of her jobs was to line produce Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, for Element. Pregnant with her second child, Dargavel was after a job that would pay a regular income. After chatting it through with Ed Guiney, he went on to introduce her to legends Calderwood and Eagan at Potboiler where she was to spend over four years as head of production. 

After our breakfast, I spent a while mapping out Dargavel’s timeline and I found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole as I criss-crossed Dargavel’s many credits, pondering over all the folk she’d interacted with who had gone on to help her during her rise. 

“I loved the intimacy of those sorts of relationships and friendships that can develop over the years,”  she says, citing Tristan Goligher, Ken Marshall, Andrea Calderwood, Gail Egan, Anna Griffin (Sister Midnight), Emily Morgan (I Am Not a Witch), and many others, who were more than “meaningful” to her.

I marvel at the tenacity of all truly creative film producers. They run through a metaphorical line of fire each and every day. But, it seems to me, the best ones, through sheer experience, are able to tackle everything that’s thrown at them. 

Will Nigeria become a new movie frontier? It’s certainly possible, just as long as outsiders don’t swoop in like white saviours, something which Dargavel most definitely is not.

Locals are eager to engage, it seems. Dargavel tells the story of cows – the mooing kind – that were late to the My Father’s Shadow set because the van transporting them had broken down. But four hours later, they arrived in a car, a couple of them travelled in the trunk. “That’s the reality of what we did,” Dargavel shrugs. “The guy needed the money, the van broke down, so he put them in the car and drove. He got paid, and we got to film the cows.”

The cows were in no way harmed.

So, yes, she’s more than ready for whatever erupts from the oilfields in Delta Force Six.

With her Cry Baby hat on, Dargavel’s a minority co-producer of Karim Aïnouz’s forthcoming Rosebush Pruning with Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, and Callum Turner.

Another Cry Baby project is with Caleb Femi (Industry, Giraffe), a poet, author, and film director. 

The planned film is based on Femi’s 2024 novel The Wickedest, which is set one night at a South London intergenerational house-party. It’s a woman’s coming-of-age story “about choices in life,” Dargavel says. Femi will write and direct.

Other projects include: August Ham set in Jamaica, written by Courttia Newland (Small Axe–  the Red, White & Blue, Lover’s Rock films, The Woman in the Wall), and Dargavel has bagged writer Daisy Haggard’s (Back to Life) as yet untitled debut feature.

“I’m not going to be like, Mrs.Nigeria only,” Dargavel says, chuckling.

We joke that perhaps Akinola Davies might one day make a movie set in the Derbyshire Dales where she grew up.

Actually…