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Testament

1988, Movie, NR, 80 mins

Testament: Review

TESTAMENT is the story of a Ghana-born British TV journalist's return to her homeland to shoot a documentary on the filming of Werner Herzog's COBRA VERDE. She has not been back to Ghana since 1966, when she fled the country after a military coup toppled the regime of Kwame Nkrumah, which she had given her wholehearted support. Now, 22 years later, the making of the documentary provides her with an excuse to look up some of her old comrades and to wrestle with some ghosts from her past. The film continually flashes back to the moment when soldiers invaded the office where the journalist and her friends once worked. With each flashback, more of the incident is revealed and observed from different perspectives as the layers of memory are peeled away. Director John Akomfrah--himself a Ghana-born Briton--combines these flashbacks and the journalist's present-day wanderings in her native country with haunting symbolism and documentary footage of the coup, presenting a revealing look at the psychological consequences for those on the losing end of dramatic political upheavals. Financed by the Black Audio Film Collective, Akomfrah has fashioned a moody, sympathetic film that looks at political history not in terms of ideology but of the way individual lives are affected. leave a comment