Canadian director Jérémy Comte’s debut feature is a story that moves between Quebec and Ghana, reaching the screen roughly ten years after work started. Comte co-wrote it with a close friend who grew up in Ghana (Will Niava), and the two spent years traveling between their home countries, trading lives and landscapes until the film became a study in how alike two distant worlds can be.
We spoke about the long road to a first feature, a motorcycle accident that left a mark on both the director and the story, and the challenges of making a movie accross two very different environements.
I saw you refer to this as a ten year project. What took so long?
It was a complicated project to finance – shooting in both Ghana and Canada, with very complex stories. I co-wrote it with a dear friend of mine who grew up in Ghana, Will Niava. He studied cinema in Montreal, so we wanted to do that same exploration in Quebec. The writing was one thing, the financing was another, and then there was the production across two countries.
Looking back, I was a bit naive to think I could make it happen so quickly.
In those ten years the both the project and myself changed a lot, and that is a good thing, because I grew as a person. Writing a first film is something by itself: the dialogue, the character development, the structure that keeps evolving. There was a lot of back and forth with readers, a lot of testing, and that took time too.
I saw on your Instagram that you had a motorcycle accident in Ghana, and it looks exactly like a scene in the movie, down to the mattress on the floor. Can you talk about what happened?
It happened in 2017, and it did influence the story. My co-writer and I had the accident while we were researching in Ghana, and it was a close call on our lives. What you see in the ending is very close to our experience. We were on one bike, trying to avoid some potholes, and there was a road divider in the middle of the road that I could not avoid. The person who sold us the bike had told us during the day that the light was good, but we came at night and the light was not good. I fell between the divider and took most of the impact and opened up my leg. He (Will Niava) tried to protect himself, which is a natural human reaction, so his knee bumped the side and he broke a bone.
It was really difficult to get to a hospital, the whole thing. They injected me with ketamine and operated on me. It was a crazy, astral, life-changing experience. There was a before and after. I had to accept death. We call it the ego death. As we were writing, I said I was going to put this into the film, and it kept coming back and making sense for the story. We took the real photo as a reference and recreated it.
I am from Morocco, and I grew up outside of a city, so I know that going to a hospital in some places is a real reality check. Was there ever a moment where you or your friend thought, no more Ghana, no more taking these risks?
No. My friend lives between Ghana and Montreal. He spends about six months in Ghana, sometimes through the Quebec winter, and he is originally from Ivory Coast too. Accra is pretty safe, honestly, and there is a really great hospital there. It was when we went to Tamale, in the north of Ghana, that the hospital was not in good shape. After the accident I did stop riding motorbikes, because it is so easy to get into an accident on one. It happens fast and unexpectedly, and the traffic is insane. We used to ride in Accra in between all the traffic and the potholes, so after that we decided to chill a bit.
Can you talk about your relationship to Ghana, and how you first went there?
I knew I wanted to tell the story in both Canada and Ghana, and because my friend is from Ghana, it was a very natural thing to go there. I was very lucky. His family welcomed me with open arms and treated me like their son, and his whole community opened a lot of doors for us. I kept coming back for the research. In Quebec it was the same the other way around. I introduced him to my Quebec friends and to the gang of skaters who inspired the movie. It was really a sharing of culture. He was influential on one character and I was influential on another, and we were both able to project ourselves into each of them.
There is a certain Quebec cinematic style that you do well, but the Ghana side has a different color palette and feel. Did you talk with your cinematographer about how to shoot each country?
We thought a lot about how to approach both countries. For Quebec we really wanted the fall, that moment when the leaves are changing color and almost all falling down. We wanted a brutalist, concrete, wet asphalt feeling, something raw and gritty. For Ghana we wanted the contrast: color, humidity, vibrancy. We shot during the Harmattan, so the skies were very sandy, and we wanted to feel that humidity and those particles of sand on the screen. There is a grittiness in both places, but it is the emotional journey that connects them. As soon as you switch from one country to the next, you know exactly where you are. That is why we did not want to shoot Quebec in the summer. We wanted strong contrast.
For the writing, did you split it, with one of you writing the Quebec characters and the other the Ghana characters?
It was really an overlapping exchange. We took super long walks, we brainstormed, we told each other the story, and we worked late into the night to hit deadlines. He skated a bit, and I started working when I was eleven years old, so there was overlap in our experiences. At some point it became about what was universal in both places. That shared humanity is what we wanted to come above all else. Even though there are cultural differences, and even though there is miscommunication and misunderstanding between both sides, deep down it is a message of love and trust, that we are all human and we can come together.
Interview edited for clarity.