Brilliant rising star Jakob Oftebro (of Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki, 2012) plays Wulff Joseph Wulff, a young rebel idealist who is sent to Danish Guinea (today’s Southeast Ghana) to establish a new viable commercial coffee plantation. There, he becomes enamoured with the potential of this new land while working closely with the natives. Wulff’s anti-colonial idealism is soon overshadowed by the more pressing moral challenge to confront the horrific exploitative practices of the corrupt Danes that rule the colony.
Inspired by letters from 1836 that he found in the Royal Library of Copenhagen, fledgling director Daniel Dencik employs a creative collision of fact and imagination to build a mesmerising picture of Wulff’s moral compass, thoughts, and inner life. Oftebro delivers an extraordinary and extreme performance as Wulff, by turns visceral, conflicted and heartbreaking. Gold Coast is a hallucinatory epic, containing richly textured Malickesque vignettes, that seize both the rugged beauty of the wild terrain and the radical beauty of the human soul spurred into action. The addition of Angelo Badalamenti’s (Twin Peaks) ethereal contemporary score brings a distinctive freshness to this powerful feature debut.
Thursday 30th June
114 min
18+
Film Festival
