Africa Film Fest 2026 Review - The Fisherman
Images courtesy of the Africa Film Festival.
I always look forward to catching a new African release, and today it’s something out of Ghana, a country whose cinema I’m totally unfamiliar with. Opening the 2026 Africa Film Fest is The Fisherman, a remake of Zoey Martinson’s 2019 short film of the same name, which follows aging Ghanaian fisherman Atta Oko Sackey (Ricky Adelayitar), a somewhat bumbling, passionate traditionalist who absolutely hates smartphones and loves fish. He hopes to be voted in as the new boat chief of his local fishing business, but when he is forced into retirement by the current Boat Chief’s pencil-pushing son, he swears to start a rival fishing business. He is spurred on by four unlikely companions: two budding young fishermen (William Lamptey and Kiki-Romi), the Boat Chief’s ambitious daughter Shasha (Endurance Dedzo), and a wisecracking talking fish named Koobi (Abdulazeem Dulo Harris), the latter of which only Atta Oko can hear. Carrying around Koobi in a bag, the group venture beyond their village to Ghanaian capital city Accra to find funding for their very own fishing boat. Along the way, they encounter the woes of being village people in the big city, or, ‘fish out of water’, one amusingly more literally than the other four.
The film being the winner of the Enrico Fulchignoni Award, an award given at the Venice Film Festival to films that best represent UNESCO values, is perhaps the best summation of what this film strives for. The Fisherman sells itself on this magical realism angle with Koobi, the talking fish, but the rest of the film is just a very unremarkably straightforward feel-good comedy-drama with splashes of environmentalist and traditionalist vs modernist social commentary. Most of it goes the way you’d expect; Atta Oko endearingly grows closer to Koobi throughout, learns about the benefits of the modern world, accepting his daughter Naa Oko’s (Adwoa Akoto) more independent big city life and warming up to Shasha’s desire to be the first female fisherman of the community, and the two young fisherman Kobina and Emmanuel learn a thing or two about Atta Oko’s spiritual Salt of the Earth ways, or in this case, the way of water.
In this sense, I wish the film actually showcased more fishing. I kept thinking about how wonderful it would’ve been to dedicate a good long scene to the process of fishing from these very unique-looking boats, something akin to Stromboli’s (1950) long and meditative fishing scene. The film is, by design, restricted to its cityscape for most of the runtime, not to mention that it’s formally a bit too manufactured and conventional to do anything too adventurous. As a result, I couldn’t help but feel that The Fisherman is unfortunately rather encumbered by its own formal limitations.
It’s all a bit predictable and visually dull, but still a rather pleasant affair, eliciting much from the gleeful charisma of the main characters. Adelayitar is obviously the standout, who feels so realistically rugged in an endearing way. I really admired a scene where, after he has been robbed, the thief joyfully finds out that Atta Oko is from the same village as his father, whom Atta Oko knows by name–then the thief proceeds to continue to rob him anyway. Moments like this make the film go down super easy, but I wouldn’t say it’s anything to write home about.
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The Fisherman screened for the Opening Night of the 2026 Africa Film Fest, which runs from the 27th to the 29th of March. For more info, click here.