Starring: Asana Alhasan, Akofa Edjeani, Adjetey Anang, Ama K. Abebrese

Synopsis: 

A fourteen year-old girl avoids a prearranged marriage and escapes to the slums of Accra where life proved to be even more challenging. 

Review:

Amina (Asana Alhasan) lived in a village with her family. They lived a life of modest means and her mother desired a better life for her. Her grandmother had been accepting gifts from a man who had hoped to impress them into allowing him to marry Amina. The marriage would have been a means of financial stability for Amina but her mother was against it. To avoid the marriage, Amina’s mother sold her to strangers who were supposed to take care of her.  

The strangers turned out to be child traffickers and luckily Amina escaped and left for Accra with Seidu (Mohammed Haafiz), a guy she met along the way. They set out to start a new life and found work in the market. When Amina couldn’t live up to the financial demands of her landlord she resorted to prostitution. This started a chain of events that went south. 

Let’s Talk. This story follows Amina, a teenager, on an exploration of life in an adult world. It’s an eye opening story because while most girls her age were in school, Amina had to quickly adapt to life as an adult. Without an education and marketable skills, she was forced to live a rock bottom life as a market porter and then prostitute. 

This is a foreign language film with subtitles. Story execution lacked as it took almost an hour for it to gain direction and momentum. It was just about  one-dimensional as there was an air of gloom that never subsided. Even the characters were serious most of the time, barely a smile from any of them.

But the film was one of quality. It raised awareness to circumstances that leads one to a life of strife and denotes that a career of prostitution is nothing but paralyzing.

The movie is similar to another titled “Joy” where another young girl had to sell her soul to survive. It’s disheartening to pay the high price of dignity for such low rewards.

Looking back at the story, maybe it would have been better for Amina to marry the older man from the village. She would have been his fourth wife but maybe she would have only spent a quarter of the time with him while he tended to his other wives. Maybe it would have been more tolerable than prostitution and abuse. It’s a hard choice a teenager shouldn’t be faced with. 

Amina eventually found her way home but not before the plot twist presented itself.  This was truly the definition of a plot twist but for avid African movie watchers, such as myself, I wasn’t that surprised. 

So, this is not the type of movie that will pick you up after a hard day at work; it’s the type of movie you have to be in the mood for. Art imitates life and life isn’t always a bowl of cherries. RECOMMEND