Rikki (Blessing Lung’aho) is your typical happy-go-lucky playboy, complete with a ‘Boys Club’ that shares dubious details of their ‘conquests’ and bails him out when he needs to cut links with women who have made the slip-up of falling for his wiles. It’s a happy life, he imagines.
However, all that is about to change when after another night of sheer revelry, a ten-year-old girl ends up at his door and stuns him with these words, “I’m your daughter”.
Amy (Hannah Wanjiku) is the personification of what will unite Rikki’s past with his present, a bridge to that last time he actually felt something with regards to another human being.
She tears down his façade and goes beneath that veneer of a carefree successful marketer, forcing him to step up to a journey of self-reacquaintance. He has to confront his own grief first before embarking on this emotional journey to provide for a child who needs solace.
Through Amy, Rikki connects with a world of Sunday morning church, homecooked meals, meaningful conversations over family dinners, bedtime stories and cartoons; a stark contrast to his free-wheeling lifestyle.
The film explores the delicate relationship between a young girl and a father who has been absent throughout her entire life, packing in raw emotion as Amy charts the way for her father, perhaps more than he does for himself.
The producers of An Instant Dad wanted it to make everyone feel something, everyone who has loved their father, lost their father or never had a father at all. There are so many people trying to pick the broken pieces of their families. It also speaks of ungrieved loss and how refusing to process pain leads to arrested development.
Above all, An Instant Dad is film about family coming together as we see Rikki’s family quickly come to his rescue. Through it all, Amy’s mother- Rikki’s childhood sweetheart- looms large. They both must do right by her.
Although premised on a profound theme, the film manages to maintain a light, playful tone and there are jocular moments between father and daughter as well as Rikki and the Boys.
This Avant Films production, directed by Jennifer Gatero, will premiere this Saturday from 6pm at the Anga Cinema, Diamond Plaza 2, Parklands
Buy your tickets here https://events.mtickets.com/events/an-instant-dad-film-/516
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