The Burial Of Kojo

Eila narrates that her father Kojo fled a recurring nightmare of the sea swallowing the earth and fire burning for seven years by moving to a remote lake village built on stilts where legend says a snail god carried the ancestors. There he met and married Ama after paying a steep bride price, and when Eila was born a mystical vision of golden droplets raining from the sky marked her as a child destined to bring prosperity. That promise curdled as Ama grew restless and left repeatedly while Kojo waited faithfully at their meeting place until the magic of their beginning faded. As Eila grows she spends her days with Kojo listening to his strange stories until a blind stranger arrives from a place between sky and earth and entrusts her with a sacred bird to protect from a crow. Meanwhile Kwabena, Kojo's older brother, reappears after a seven-year absence and reopens the wound of his marriage to Adra, the woman Kojo loved, which broke Kojo's heart. Their friend Apalu, who runs an illegal mining operation, draws Kojo back into dangerous work just as Chinese mining interests encroach on the land, and Kojo vanishes without a trace, prompting a police investigation led by Detective Kumson that quickly stalls when the Chinese suspects are released and deported under mysterious orders. Eila and Ama press the authorities but the system fails them, so guided by her father's stories and the uncanny logic of her childhood visions Eila seeks out Uncle Kwabena in a desolate field. Their conversation turns surreal as Kwabena reveals he is dead and speaks from beyond about the land's corruption and the spiritual debt owed. He points her toward the truth of her father's fate, and Eila follows the sign running across open grassland to a deep dark pit in the earth where she screams for her father and peers into the abyss. A police recovery operation pulls a body from the depths of the pit and an older man identifies the corpse saying it is him.