2018 Directed by Ben Asamoah
There’s a treasure trove of information to be found in the poisonous e-waste in Ghana. It’s a relatively simple matter to open up hard drives and gain access to photos and the personal details of their former owners. Equipped with a name and address, almost anybody can be found online. A young mother looks in astonishment at an American street that she has conjured up on Google Maps in a matter of seconds—this is Ama, one of the internet con artists in this film.
Netherlands
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Belgium
Belgium
Netherlands
An empathetic, small-scale and personal immersion into the world of Ghanaian dating scammers, with an unexpectedly melancholy and meditative tone as it explores our shrinking options in this globalised world – and unusually for this kind of documentary, it’s strikingly cinematic. The final shot before the credits, which plays out silently with audio snippets of phone calls running over the top, is totally jaw-dropping and haunting.
I caught Sakawa at MIFF last year and was blown away it's distinctive style of documentary filmmaking. It plays out like a wistful, melancholy meditation on globalisation and the people it leaves behind, telling the story of online dating scammers in Ghana as they try to build lives for themselves using the limited resources they have available, in a world where rapid industrialisation and historical exploitation have left them sifting through digital detritus to try to scrape by. It's haunting, strange and left a profound impression on me.
This weekend Sakawa is streaming live online at Hyperlinks, the online incarnation of the successful IRL festival run earlier this year by Melbourne and Sydney-based screening collective Static Vision.
Under 300 people…
A documentary about people appealing to Western aesthetics and romanticism to gain a foothold in a world where globalisation has only brought the ravages imperialism into brighter light, shot and cut like a narrative feature to aestheticise and corral these lives and scams into empathetic and accessible forms. Great trick, why hasn’t this been seen by a million people yet.
You want a documentary to feature a few "wow" moments, and Sakawa delivers numerous times. The title refers to the Ghanaian style of internet fraud, in which people - mostly men - pose as lonely women on dating sites and scam guys in North America and Europe into sending them money. Everyone knows it happens, but this fly-on-the-wall true account shows you exactly how, focusing largely on an experienced scammer and his penniless sister, Ama, who he's offered to train up. The people we follow are criminals, yet I found myself on their side because of how insanely gullible their loser victims are. Seriously, if the sum total of your romantic phone calls with somebody is "Hi, how are you…
I'm kind of left in awe by this documentary because I can barely get my head around it actually being a documentary. It is shot in such a cinematic way that makes it feel like a narrative film that allows (or forces us to see) these real people as characters.
Voodoo operates alongside Christianity, all interactions are revealed to be transactional, and even obtaining a passport holds the threat of a scam. The final scene of burning electronics, alongside the animals of the junk yard, and the audio clips from the phone dating scams is incredible.
Good shit, while still running into the usual problems of most docu-fiction hybrids / doc debuts viz. forcing narrative / parallels where I would have appreciated more veritè. The switch in POV, the colonized scamming the colonizers with electronics and tools modified from e-trash, gives this one a smoldering, righteous anger, which fuels a lot of the interaction and self-perception here. Asamoah also never actually clarifies the industry and structure around the scams aside from the religious component, which remains the most fascinating aspect here, not as much bridging tradition and technology as showing how each is reaching out for the other.
55/100
An intimate look at the lives of Ghanaian internet scammers.
Uncovering the secret lives of Ghanaian con-artists who trawl dumped e-waste for data, this intricate and meditative documentary centers on those who catfish unsuspecting Americans and Europeans as a means of escaping extreme poverty. A hyper-real aesthetic complicates Ben Asamoah’s exploration of his desperate subjects, as the film begins to resemble a narrative feature.
“Sakawa is compassionate without resorting to maudlin, one-dimensional sympathy, as dignifying of its subjects as it is willing to show some indelicate realities.” - Beatrice Loayza, MUBI Notebook
Sun, Feb 23, 3.45pm - Pink Flamingo Cinema (screens as part of Hyperlinks: A Static Vision Festival)
Another entry in the documentary style of “spend some time in the lives of [intriguing occupation title that reels you in] in [place you probably don’t know a lot about].” If you’re a sucker for that kind of thing, by all means, check this out. Personally, I don’t see why this had any business being feature length. There was nothing conveyed here that you didn’t already get after the first 20-30 minutes. I saw two films after this that were well over 2 hours, yet at 80 minutes this felt like the longest of the lot by far.
8 /10
Had to log this into #MIFF2019goats quickly;
because when the rather threatening Chief Ba-Ba, Voodoo Doctor & Scammer Extraordinaire of Ghana shows off his giddy herd of 'em -
well, I just know I'm on a winner (even if the "..naughty..." [his words!] elderly white USA guy, having the splatter moment of his phone sex recorded into a doco about Scammers, isn't!).
Trust me, you will react to this doco.
Hey, this is a really cool approach to documentary filmmaking - at times, very funny, at times, super depressing, constantly feels like a narrative feature; very disconcerting and very mad.
She’d eat $250 of fish a week and only pay me $12 a month. I don’t feel any guilt for these white people.
A documentary that really humanizes and informs, shares reality without drama or judgement. I wasn’t emotional, not moved or shocked or any of that. I was just calmly presented reality.
The cinematography, sound design, foley, editing, storytelling: all of it was nice. The editing and storytelling combined gave a pleasant viewer’s experience.
It was nothing special per se, it was just good. Solid. Well done.
