Zoey Martinson on Making ‘The Fisherman,’ Its Venice Premiere, and Sharing Ghanaian Humor and Color With the World

There are two origin stories for Zoey Martinson’s The Fisherman. The thrilling feature-length comedy first began with a short film Martinson wrote in response to information about Jamestown, home to the Ga fishermen in Accra, Ghana, being cleared out for a new seaport. 

Because Martinson finds her stride in fiction, and not in the world of documentaries or nonfiction, she chose to highlight the situation by humorously dramatising it. “I'm not a documentary director or writer, so I created a tiny script for this funny short film about a fisherman who is about to be forced into retirement, and he goes out fishing and gets a talking fish,” Martinson tells OkayAfrica. Produced by Kofi-Owusu Afriyie, Martinson says the film was made “in a weekend and it was really fun.”

That short would go on to garner immense attention and later form the narrative basis for Martinson’s first feature, The Fisherman, which also bears a similar plotline to the short and is executive-produced by Yvonne Orji. 

The second origin story is perhaps most important to its beauty and narrative tenor. It starts with Martinson, who, as a teenager, at an existential crossroads, was sent to live in Keta, a small fishing village in Ghana. 

Much of Martinson’s time at Keta was spent helping out in the local school, playing bus conductor, but more than anything, unknowingly collecting stories that will serve her practice later in life. “It pushed a value system that I wasn't getting so much in the U.S., other than at home, which is that people are important and the community, and it also kind of just forced me to slow down a bit and see and dream,” she says.

In The Fisherman, dreaming is also at the core of what drives the characters forward. The film is a funny and hearty story about a man, Atta Oko (Ricky Adelayitor), whose dream of becoming a boat chief sends him on a life-altering journey alongside a group of other characters, comprising a talking fish, the strong-headed daughter of the current boat chief, and two orphaned boys-turned-friends. It’s a brilliantly delivered story about misfits and what that means in a world that’s rapidly changing and homogenizing. 

The story is driven forward by Martinson’s deeply observant writing — of class differences in Ghana, of the environmental degradation currently taking place around Ghana’s water bodies, and of the need to fulfill one’s self-appointed destiny. Through a series of hilarious circumstances, the group of dreamers who are in the pursuit of securing funding to buy a boat, are brought closer to their own unexplored identities and come to discover the extent they will go to rebecome.

Much of the writing and flow of the story comes from a lot of listening, Martinson says. “I definitely listened a lot through the years. The robbery scene is really funny, but it actually happened to my producer years ago. A lot of scenes come from a friend or my personal interaction.”

Comedy as resistance

Last year, The Fisherman screened at the Venice Film Festival as Ghana’s first official selection and took home the UNESCO Fellini Medal. This year, it won the Ja'net Dubois Best Feature Narrative at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles. Its immense success is a testament to the weight that comedy carries. By existing, it contradicts the idea that a film cannot be taken seriously if it is funny, or even that an African film can only be showcased at international festivals when it tackles grave and sombre themes. 

“I think the reason it was drawn to festivals is that it is a comedy, but it's exploring these [heavy] themes, through a way that is refreshing and new,” Martinson posits. “Also, when it goes internationally, people are so excited to see Ghana.”

The Fisherman makes its official debut in Ghana, the country where it was filmed, on September 19. But long before this highly anticipated homecoming, it has carried a strong statement everywhere in the world that it has screened — that stories of joy can be powerful and perhaps even, necessary now more than ever.

Martinson says her comedic voice was shaped by her environment and a family for whom being funny was easy — especially when things weren't going well. “One thing that I noticed is the communities in which I lived, which were poorer areas, use comedy as a way to just get through life,” she says. “I always say comedy comes from our deepest tragedies, and that's what makes it funny. And so I think my work is always coming from tragedy, but it's how these characters in my world would realistically deal with that tragedy through somewhat of a humorous touch.”

But for Martinson, the trick to being able to make comedic films with meaning is knowing when something isn’t funny and allowing it to be exactly that. We see this play out in several emotional scenes in The Fisherman. It’s present where Sasha (played by influencer and dancer Endurance Dedzo) navigates her sense of identity and place in the male-dominated world of fishing. We also see it where Ata Oko and his daughter Naa (played by Adwoa Akoto) start to see each other for the first time in a long time, and are forced to accept versions of each other that have changed and that are holding on to the past.

“I don't always want to just make a joke of something,” Martinson observes. “I want there to be some kind of comedy coming from the reality of how we live our lives.”

While The Fisherman excels on a plot level, it’s even more brilliant as a visual feast. Each frame is filled with splashes of color, Ghana — which is very much a funny and incorrigible character in this film — dazzles, sweats, and gleams. B-rolls of everyday life are layered between fast-paced scenes, thus slowing things down and conveying a clear but realistic romanticism between the frame and its subject. Landscapes and shots of the sea are zoomed in and captured in their most honest forms. Like the core theme of the film itself, Martinson understands that the way a city is captured is primarily dependent on who is looking at it and their ability to see the beauty in what may have been written off as decay.

Working with a lean budget, Martinson says her team was able to pull off these shots by relying on the natural beauty of the fishing community where they filmed. That, and simply waiting for dawn to start filming.

As The Fisherman unfolds into a beautiful journey of hope, self-redemption, and an unwillingness to let go of the past, it ushers in an instructive new age of cinema in Ghana. With an ambitious film that has garnered immense attention, Martinson’s hopes for its premiere in Ghana are charmingly modest. “I hope that at least people laugh a few times and have a good ride. And if they come out and they love it, then even better, you know?”