Cinema
Love Brewed in the African Pot
Kwaw Ansah · 1980
Synopsis
In the Gold Coast of 1951, still a British colony, Aba Appiah, the daughter of a retired civil servant who has been through the best schools in Cape Coast, falls in love with Joe Quansah, a half-illiterate mechanic, the son of a fisherman. Her father, Kofi Appiah, who intends her for a man of his own choosing, opposes their union, and this family conflict has consequences that no one had foreseen. The film mixes satire, comedy and melodrama, and makes of this love story, often compared to Romeo and Juliet, the portrait of a clash between tradition and European ways.
Context
Released in 1980, the film had been financed by a loan that its author secured against his father-in-law's house; he related that the exhibitors at first refused to screen it, convinced that an African film would draw no one, then fought over it when it earned more than the American films. In Kenya, he was asked to withdraw it for a time from the billing to give a James Bond room to breathe. At the seventh Fespaco it received the Oumarou Ganda prize, the first awarded to a film from an English-speaking country. His second feature came only in 1989.
Who it is for
A two-hour film, in English, mixing comedy and melodrama; it helps to know what colonial society on the coast was like.
Prizes and reception
An immense popular success in English-speaking Africa, it is regarded as a classic; the New York Times reviewed it as early as 1981.
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