General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Burial of Kojo

The Burial of Kojo is a 2018 Ghanaian-American drama film directed and written by Samuel "Blitz" Bazawule, telling the story of a young girl, Esi, who recounts her childhood and the bitter rivalry between her father, Kojo, and her uncle, Kwabena, through a magical-realist lens. It is Bazawule's debut feature film, made with a modest budget raised through a Kickstarter campaign, and it became the first Ghanaian movie to premiere on Netflix when the streaming service released it in March 2019.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Samuel "Blitz" Bazawule, a Ghanaian-born filmmaker and musician known by the stage name Blitz the Ambassador; his debut feature¹
Production	Ghana and USA, 2018, 80 minutes, drama and thriller¹
Principal cast	Cynthia Dankwa (Esi), Joseph Otsiman (Kojo), Kobina Amissah-Sam (Kwabena), Mamley Djangmah (Ama), Ama K. Abebrese (older Esi, narrator)³
Awards	Best Narrative Feature (World Cinema) at the 2018 Urbanworld Film Festival; Grand Nile Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the 2019 Luxor African Film Festival⁴
Distribution	ARRAY, Ava DuVernay's company; on Netflix in the United States from March 2019 to April 2022⁵^•³
Critical reception	100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 15 reviews⁶

Spoilers

Story and structure

Esi, shown as a grown woman (Ama K. Abebrese), recounts the story of her father Kojo's death (Joseph Otsiman) and the strained bond he shared with his brother Kwabena (Kobina Amissah-Sam).⁷ Esi lives with her mother, Ama (Mamley Djangmah), and her father in a poor village of small houses built on stilts in a lake, connected to the shore by narrow walkways. Kojo, a loving but unreliable fisherman, takes Esi around the lake in his boat and spins entrancing tales; he is haunted by dreams rooted in his city years, when he and his elder brother Kwabena were rivals for the same woman. Kwabena married her, but she died in a car accident on their wedding day, poisoning the bond between the brothers.⁵

When the family's finances fail, Kwabena arrives with promises of a better life in the city, and Kojo moves the family to Accra against his wife's judgment and his daughter's forebodings. There Kwabena draws him into digging for gold on the off-limits site of a mine shut down by a Chinese company. The film's premise, as summarized by distributors, is that Kojo is trapped in a mine shaft by his vengeful brother while Esi embarks on a magical journey to rescue him.⁵^•³

The narrative constantly shifts in and out of the supernatural, blending a real-world story with a hazier sense of spiritualism. Esi's unearthly journeys take her into a plane populated by figures of Ghanaian myth and superstition that reveal themselves as avatars of people from her real life; much of her life is based on a vision dreamt by her father, in which Esi was destined to save the world.⁷ The ending leaves the cause of Kojo's disappearance open: suicide, murder, or unexplained departure, with Esi calling on myth and detective work to solve the mystery.⁴

Setting and social themes

The film opens in Nzulezo, a village where houses stand on stilts near the banks of Lake Tandane, some two hundred miles from Accra, before shifting to the capital.⁴ The mining work Kojo is drawn into is galamsey, a Ghanaian term derived from the phrase "gather them and sell" for informal, unregulated, and often illegal small-scale gold mining; the mine in the film is dangerous, likely illegal, and abandoned.⁴

Critics read the film as carrying social and political weight. Richard Brody, a film critic at The New Yorker since 1999 and author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, noted its depiction of the economic colonialism of newly arrived Chinese businesses, petty corruption in the local police, corruption at higher levels of law enforcement, and the contrast between the modernizing city and the citizens struggling in its shadows.⁵ The Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday described it as containing "myriad truths about an Africa where economic exploitation and colonialism have taken on new forms and accents."⁸

A distinctive device is the embedded Spanish-language telenovela Puebla mi amor, which Esi watches with her grandmother. Set in Miami but shot by Bazawule in Ghana with expatriate actors, it functions as aspirational television picturing a prosperous life abroad, and it mirrors the film's conflict, making raw passions of guilt, envy, and revenge plain where the brothers' surface behavior stays restrained.⁴

Style and production

Working with cinematographer Michael Fernandez, Bazawule uses slow motion, images saturated in blues and shadow, glowing pink skies, fast and slow motion, digital superimpositions, and reversed footage to render Esi's inner world. He also composed the film's score, drawing on Afropop and more classical sounds.⁵^•⁸ The project originated from a newspaper article and was funded largely through a successful Kickstarter campaign.¹

Bazawule, born in Accra, Ghana and based in the United States, had previously made the short films Native Sun (2012) and Diasporadical Trilogìa (2016) and released three studio albums as Blitz the Ambassador; he is a 2016 TED Fellow and a recipient of the Vilcek Prize.¹ The film was produced by Ama K. Abebrese, Bazawule, and Terence Nance.⁹

Release and reception

ARRAY, Ava DuVernay's distribution company, released the film, and Netflix picked it up for select territories; it premiered on the service on March 31, 2019, and remained available in the United States until April 2022.⁵^•³ It was a 2019 Pan African Film Festival Official Selection and won Best Narrative Feature (World Cinema) at the 2018 Urbanworld Film Festival in New York, followed by the Grand Nile Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the 2019 Luxor African Film Festival.¹^•⁴

Reviewers praised its visual ambition. Hornaday called it "a visionary fable drenched with vibrancy and lyricism" and gave it 3.5 of 4 stars;⁸ the African Studies Review review placed it within contemporary surrealist African filmmaking, noting antecedents in Afrosurrealism as characterized by the critic and poet Amiri Baraka.⁴ Some critics were more reserved: one review found that the film's many elements never quite melded into a coherent whole, though it credited Bazawule's visual sense and willingness to experiment.⁷

The film's language is reported differently across sources: the African Film Festival lists Akan and English,¹ the African Studies Review review lists Twi and English,⁴ and the Washington Post review lists Fante, Twi, and English with subtitles.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026