The Burial of Kojo dir. by Samuel Bazawule (review)

In Samuel "Blitz" Bazawule's film The Burial of Kojo, mythical expressions come from unexpected places. Cinematographer Michael Fernandez's use of slow-motion, images deeply saturated in blues and shadow, glowing pink skies, and sparkling light flowing from the night sky conjure an enchanted world accompanied by Bazawule's original score. But flickering in the background of narrator older Esi's (Ama K. Abebrese) reflections and realizations, the television disrupts the escapist pleasure of these dreamy images and grounds the film in today's African media culture. The telenovela Puebla mi amor, which is embedded in the film, conveys profound truths.

The Burial of Kojo features significant shifts in settings, beginning in isolated and idyllic Nzulezo, a village where the houses are set on stilts near the banks of Lake Tandane, some two hundred miles away from the capital city of Accra. This setting is the magical location where Kojo (Joseph Otsiman) parents Esi through storytelling; it appears uncomplicated by the noise and demands of the city or, of a woman's understanding of her father's failings.

Throughout much of the film, we hear the narrator, young Esi (Cynthia Dankwa), recounting the stories her father told her in a lilting, steady child's voice. However, the true nature of her father and uncle's relationship—a bitter rivalry over a woman they both loved that only deepened when her father, driving while intoxicated and distraught, struck the newlyweds on their wedding night, killing the bride—is revealed to her through the Spanish-language soap opera she watches with her grandmother in the late afternoons. When she sees one brother strike the other on the tv screen, she asks "Is that what happened between my father and uncle?" Knowing the answer is in the question, she runs out of the room on a quest to reconcile her father's absence.

Bazawule created Puebla mi amor specifically for the film and shot it in Ghana along with the rest of the film. In an interview, he explained: "Puebla mi Amor is a completely fictitious telenovela I created just out of knowing how much telenovela culture really has played an impact on Ghanaian ideology—ideas of love, ideas of family" (Patrick D'Arcy, "Behind-the-scenes of The Burial of Kojo—a dazzling new film shot in Ghana" [TED Fellows, October 25, 2017]). The ambitious director had initially planned to cast and film the soap opera in Miami, Florida, where its story is set and where a majority of telenovelas are filmed, but with his budget based largely on funds raised from his successful Kickstarter campaign, he decided to locate the shoot in Accra and recruited expats to play the characters. Commenting on the extra work of creating a television show within his film, Bazawule explained, "It was really exciting to create that world right here, and show that it's all fluid—that we live in a polycultural society and nothing is an island and everything's borrowed from the next" (D'Arcy, "Behind-the-scenes"). Telenovelas have been broadcast widely in Africa since the 1970s, and with the televisualization of African media—i.e., fewer theatrical venues and rare opportunities for original film production and distribution—the increased competition among international corporations for screen time has been waged on screens in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and elsewhere on the continent. Changes in technology, taste, and economics have made the telenovela form more accessible in Ghana.

The telenovela within The Burial of Kojo offers both realism and surrealism in that it bends time; it is a popular form of media culture, shot specifically for The Burial of Kojo, and it is a universe running parallel to the main film. Its plot mirrors and reflects the darker realities of her life that the young girl Esi could not fully recognize but that become apparent to her as the adult and author of the story we are hearing and seeing.

Puebla mi amor condenses the film's...