Funded on Kickstarter, shot in Accra, picked up by Ava DuVernay: how The Burial of Kojo reached Netflix
The money for The Burial of Kojo came largely from a Kickstarter campaign. Less than a year after its premiere, the Ghanaian film was streaming worldwide on Netflix with Ava DuVernay’s name attached.
The film was written and directed by Samuel “Blitz” Bazawule, the Ghanaian musician known for years as Blitz the Ambassador. It premiered at the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York on 21 September 2018 and won the festival’s award for Best Narrative Feature. DuVernay’s distribution company, ARRAY, acquired it for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, and it arrived on Netflix on 31 March 2019.
The story
The Burial of Kojo is told through the eyes of Esi, a young girl whose father, Kojo, lives a quiet life with his family by a lake. His estranged brother, Kwabena, arrives, and old grievances between the two men lead to Kojo being trapped in an abandoned illegal gold mine. Esi sets out to save him, crossing into a spirit world where a crow and a mysterious figure stand between her and her father.
The film mixes family drama, folklore and social comment. Galamsey, the illegal small-scale gold mining that has poisoned rivers and destroyed farmland across Ghana, runs through the story. Ghanaian viewers knew that world well; international audiences mostly did not.
A musician’s eye
Bazawule came to film from music. As Blitz the Ambassador he released albums in the United States, where he had moved, and toured internationally with a live band. His music videos and short films were already known for their strong visual style, and critics reviewing The Burial of Kojo kept returning to its colours, its use of water and landscape, and its dreamlike structure.
The film ran about 80 minutes and was made in Twi and English. The cast was mostly Ghanaian, and it was shot on location in Ghana, including in and around Accra.
What came after
The film changed Bazawule’s career. He was one of the co-directors of Beyoncé’s visual album Black Is King (2020), and he went on to direct the 2023 film adaptation of the musical The Color Purple, produced by Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones among others. That made him one of the few Ghanaian-born directors to lead a major Hollywood studio production.
Why it matters for Ghanaian film
Ghana has a long film history, from the state-backed productions of the Nkrumah era to the video boom and Kumawood. What Ghanaian filmmakers have often lacked is international distribution. The Burial of Kojo showed one route: a strong festival run, a respected distributor, and a streaming platform willing to put a Twi-language film in front of a global audience.
The director who made his first feature on crowdfunded money was directing a Warner Bros. musical within five years. Galamsey, the subject he put at the centre of that first film, is still on the front pages in Ghana.
