Wheelbarrow Production and African Film Society present Cynthia Dankwa (Esi), Ama K. Abresee (Older Ese) Joseph Otsiman (Kojo), Kwabinah Amissah-Sam (Kwabena), Manley Djangmah (Ama), Henry Adofo (Apalu), Joyce Anima, Misa Amdah (Nana). Writer, Director, Blitz Bazawule; Director of Photography, Michael Fernandez; Executive Producer, Caroline Trimborn, Dominic Pemson, Tina Harris, Jesse Williams, Nyema Tubman, Michael Obeng, Janet Bazawule. © 2018
Auteur Blitz Bazawule in his debut Cinema Verité presents visible poetry on screen in The Burial of Kojo. I don’t quite know what his vision for this project might be, but it is not the flashy, colorful type that would attract mainstream cinema-goers, notwithstanding the gripping story it tells.
The story itself has not much to it, but the mechanics that went into producing such telltale project matters. If I could strip the account to a bare-bones, this is the story: The older brother Kwabena (Kwabinah Amissah-Sam) had had age-old hatred for his younger brother Kojo (Joseph Otsiman). As their mother could tell her granddaughter, Esi (Cynthia Dankwa), in their youth, Kwabinah almost drowned Kojo in a tub, had she not being around. And like the story of Joseph in the Bible, the hatred continued and bloomed when the choice girl Kojo wanted to marry was eventually married by Kwabinah.
The wedding was a big one, and there were lots of patrons and drinks. A tragedy occurred when Kojo wrecks the Volkswagon beetle, and Kwabena’s bride died in the wreck. What a shame and disappointment. Kwabena couldn’t go back to the village, but go head-on someplace and comes back to town, seven years after his wife died. He and his brother Kojo visit the cemetery, and Kwabena pours a libation to her. You think he has gotten over the loss, or Kojo bears remorse for the accident. One senses Kwabena’s character’s disposition as a furlong. He is distant, drinks a lot, and by his chain-smoking, one could detect something substantial on his mind.
Now that Kwabena comes back to town, he feels his brother needs to move to the city for a better life, and he convinces him so. Kwabena wants him and his brother to go illegal mining even as Kojo doesn’t feel like getting involved. Kwabena pressures his younger brother, and eventually, he agrees. At the mines, Kwabena slaps Kojo, and he falls in a hole where he abandons him and runs away. This time their mother isn’t around to save Kojo, but the dumping of his brother in the hole and living him there to die is in a biblical realm.
Like I said earlier, there’s not much to the story itself that we haven’t seen in the Bible or stories between two brothers as told by legends. Now that I have taken the grains from the chaff like my high school literature teacher used to say, what matters here is the way Blitz says his story of brotherly hatred. Being an artist singer, he almost sang in a musical and poetic tone the story of two brothers. Like Woody Allen, Blitz didn’t come out to attract the universe. He talks to the audience that sees beyond the canvass-the viewers with aesthetic eyes and minds; without such faculties, the general audience quickly turns off.
In the first place, The Burial of Kojo has the personal characteristic of a low budget production, where he tries to do more with less. The inside story on TV (Telemundo) relating to hatred between two brothers and the murder of one of them over a woman is an oversimplification of The Burial of Kojo. Blitz must be yarning to tell an account to those who couldn’t break his poetic codes. The parallel story to the American audience might be a little cheesy. He further rubs in expose by taking a swipe at the Arab gold trader who could give a black market price of the gold Ghanians sell to him. We are aware of the desperate dispositions of the characters, and we know they are falling on hard times.
The most fantastic part of Blitz’s tale is the use of the non-filtered story, telling it raw as they come to his creative mind. He bent the rules in many places, like the use of camera movements-handheld with the jerky and uneven shots, high-angle shots. Lightings, the colorings, and the directions never used in major commercial films, all create images on the screen like apparitions. The appearance of Esi, who is mostly in white, portrays her as the angel against the crow. The most beautiful of all is a high angle long shot when Esi, in white, runs away from the camera on a very long, narrow, and straight road until she becomes a white blot on screen.
Blitz uses the ominous cawing of crows, and the ever hovering and searching cries of birds of the night, the foaming angry sea swallowing the land, that forbodes the future tide of times in the movie. Don’t let me forget the tickling of the clock, that mechanical element, which strikes like a call to a funeral ceremony. At first, it starts from afar, then comes closer, louder, and louder, as if one is getting closer to the end. Blitz cleverly uses such elements, mechanical I could repeat here, to foretell happenings, that the story is hurrying to tell.
There are lots of rumblings, dark and cloudy skies, and silhouettes of shots of characters against hollow backgrounds that give a weird caricature of troubled souls, that present a Rembrandt effect. The war between the two brothers gets headed by the two phenomenal birds: the crow and the dove. With such symbols in The Burial of Kojo, one could detect a tragic end. And who do you think is going to win the struggle: the spiritual bird dove, or the haunting, horse-riding evil bird of death, crow.
Fate and more excellent instinct play a large part in the casting of the characters in The Burial of Kojo. Except for Ama (mother) and Kwabena (father) characters who had previously appeared in Beasts of No Nation, and the practice follow them in this project, all other players here have never performed in front of a movie camera. Ama K. Aberese appears here as Ama and Kobena appear here as Kwabena. Beast Of No Nation gamble on Abraham Attah and see how he proves to be natural. His acting and contribution to Elba’s role bring so much to the film. In The Burial, Esi, and her father, Kojo (Joseph Otsimah), though, never been in a movie, add so much value to the performance. The Ghanian crop of new and inexperienced actors are very fortunate to bring a shine to the industry. Sometimes its good to go in the wild and bet your stars on it.
This shoe-string budget, however, used lots of white wardrobes by principal players, like to portray the spiritual essence of beings in the story. By the use of simple dressings and locations, the auteur demonstrates the abject poverty of his characters as they move from the sea coast to the part of the city that holds no promise. Well, Blitz Bazawule is breaking grounds as a realist filmmaker, in the likes of De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (1949), hence the style of his shots, and simplicity of the story.