Kukurantumi - Road to Accra

Kukurantumi is a village in Ghana. In the local language: “the place in which everything is too difficult to pick up”.Addey, a lorry driver, lives there with his family. Every day he drives a lorry fit for the scrap-heap the 100 km between Kukurantumi and Accra, the capital, and back again. The loading space is fitted with wooden benches for the passengers. In Accra it seems easier to get things moving; at any rate this is what it looks to the inhabitants of Kukurantumi.One day there’s an accident. Addey is not to blame –his brakes failed to function- but he still loses job. Shall he go back to the plantation again as a simple worker? Addey tries his luck in the capital. As soon as he has found work, he’ll come and fetch his wife Sewa and his almost grown up daughter Abena. Kofi, a street trader, helps him to tide over the first few days. Addey borrows some money and repairs an old lorry. He returns to Kukurantumi as a “rich man” with the intention of marrying Abena to his creditor, who is the owner of a vehicle workshop. But things do not work out according to plan. Abena loves Bob, a young palm wine tapper. She resists the pressure put on her by her father and runs away with Bob. Addey returns to Accra alone. He becomes ever more deeply entangled in the contradictions between his traditional way of life and big city business practice.In contrast to documentary film projects where there has often been cooperation between countries of the First and the Third World, this television play production is one of few cases in which it has been possible to make a genuine coproduction with a country of the Thirld World. This cooperation is not limited to a purely financial participation. King Ampaw, formerly a student at the Munich Academy for Film and Television and today director at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation wrote this film together with the German author, Ralf Franz, and made it in Ghana in six weeks with a team of nine Germans and 42 Ghanaians. The production was a new beginning in feature film productions for Ghana and its “film industry” (last film 1976)A film has been made which on the one hand takes German viewers into an African country and tells them an African story, but which on the other hand –when shown in the cinemas in Accra- mirrors for the Ghanaian audiences something of the reality of their own country.KUKURANTUMI –ROAD TO ACCRA is an approach to a strange culture both for the makers of the film –black and white- and the viewers.