Visionary Letters

Lettres du Voyant is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana, which attempts to uncover some truths about a mysterious practice called 'Sakawa' – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic. Tracing back the scammers’ stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of anti-neocolonial resistance. The film takes the form of a voyage to the end of the world, travelling through a network of digitised mine shafts that lead the viewer to each of the film’s locations; a gold mine, an e-waste dump, a voodoo ritual or a discotheque for example. A character recounts a story through reading a series of letters that he has written to the film’s author – letters that speak about the colonial history of Ghana, of gold, of technology.