“The Fisherman”, interview with director Zoey Martinson and producers Kofi Owusu Afriyie and Korey Jackson

At 81th Venice Film Festival FRED Film Radio interviewed director Zoey Martinson and producers Kofi Owusu Afriyie and Korey Jackson to talk about “The Fisherman”, one of the four films made during the Biennale College Cinema 2024.

The importance of humor

Even if there is a lot of humor and “The Fisherman” is a fantasy comedy you also talk about what’s going on in Ghana these days because of globalization. How did Zoey Martinson manage to work on these two different elements? “Most of my time spent living in a rural fishing village in Ghana, I actually spent it laughing. I realised Ghanaians are really funny, it’s just a culture that has a really great sense of humour, and life can be hard, of course, sometimes less modern conveniences if you’re in the villages, but people are still laughing and having a lot of fun and making jokes. A lot of the films that I saw coming out of Ghana didn’t reflect sometimes the tone. I felt like that was the correct tone to tell the story, and also something I just hadn’t seen. My hope was that I could use a comedy to kind of look at that, and also address the result of global warming on a country that’s trying to keep up”.

The production’s challenges

“The Fisherman” was made over ten months as part of the Biennale College Cinema project. Ten months in which it was written, shot and post-produced.

“It was pretty intense, but we got through it with the help of our people because without their support, this wouldn’t have happened, and without the support of the Biennale, we know we couldn’t have done this, so we are eternally grateful to them”, says Kofi Owusu Afriyie. “And of course, we did have a few challenges here and there, but that comes with the job, and we understood what we were in for”. “On this budget level, we had a pretty ambitious film for the resources we had. So a lot of work was to plan very specifically how we were going to accomplish all of the things that we needed to accomplish to get this story told in line with Zoe’s vision. There were challenges along the way. So being able to adapt when needed to make sure we weren’t missing anything along the way was the biggest challenge, but I think we’re all very pleased with the result”, discusses Korey Jackson. “We’re actively speaking with people about the future of the film, and it will be in more festivals, and also talking about sales, and hopefully a distribution in all of the regions of the world”.

A female character to open people’s eyes

One of the characters, Sasha, struggles to find her place in a male-dominated environment and not to marry. How important was it for the director to write such a female character in “The Fisherman” ? “I wanted to talk about a woman who is trying to figure out where she fits into the world and with her identity, but also with her dreams and how she has to navigate that in a male dominated world. I think that translates to me as a female director in the US. I understand that feeling of being in a male dominated space and trying to cut my own path as a woman director. We’re experiencing weirdly the same thing, and so it was kind of my experience manifested into her experience and her life. And then just using the kind of situations that are going on in Ghana and dealing with all of that stuff and putting it in there I hope to open people’s eyes and hopefully they can see value and sometimes people they might toss aside or discredit”.

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