"Paradise" (Berlinale Review): Two Fatherless Boys, One Scam, and a Film Still Finding Its Shape

Kojo's father, a fisherman in Accra, disappears during a storm at sea. Before he is gone, he tells his son a story: close your eyes and imagine a place that brings you peace. Paradise. Years later, in Quebec, a woman named Chantal falls in love with a cargo ship captain she has never met. The captain's name, his profession, and the story he tells her are all fabrications, created by Kojo, now a teenager running romance scams from a compound in Accra.

The film is structured in three titled chapters — "The Boat," "The Captain," "The Fire." Comte and co-writer Will Niava, an Ivorian-Ghanaian filmmaker raised in Accra and educated at the same Montreal film program as Comte, are interested in the economics and daily texture of the scam operation itself: the recruitment pipeline, the training of younger boys, the six-month cultivation of a single target.