‘Paradise’ Berlinale Review: Teen Lives Collide Across Two Continents

Two stories that seem to have nothing to do with each other gradually intersect in Paradise, a drama that weaves together family ties, romantic longing, reflections on colonialism, and—above all—the risks of connecting with strangers online. For a good stretch of its running time, the film feels like two separate movies unfolding in parallel: one set in Accra, Ghana, the other in a small town in Québec, Canada. But networks are supposed to connect everything—or so we like to believe—and that assumption sits at the heart of the film. Paradise is ultimately about misunderstandings, traps, deceptions, and the fraught experiences that arise when two radically different worlds collide in real life.

Kojo (Daniel Atsu Hukporti) is a teenager in Accra who works, often reluctantly, under the command of his strict, tradition-minded father, a local fisherman. Tony (Joey Boivin-Desmeules) is roughly the same age but lives in Canada with his single mother, Chantal (Évelyne de la Chenelière), and spends his days skating with friends. At first glance, the only thing they seem to have in common is that both smoke marijuana behind their parents’ backs. Beyond that, they inhabit entirely different universes.

One day, Kojo’s father disappears at sea, leaving the boy exposed and on his own, struggling to survive on the streets of Accra and scraping by however he can. In Québec, meanwhile, Chantal begins an online relationship with a sailor traveling through Africa and decides to send him thousands of dollars to help him out of a supposed emergency—money she partly takes from her son’s savings. Anyone who has seen a documentary about online scams, or read about them in the news, can immediately see what’s happening: Chantal has fallen victim to phishing, and the chances of recovering the money are slim to none.

Paradise eventually finds a way to connect these two stories, these two continents, realities, and adolescences, while trying to move beyond prejudice, fear, and preconceived notions about what the world looks like outside one’s own experience. Kojo and his friends, shaped by the legacy of colonialism, may believe that the First World is full of wealthy people who somehow deserve to be punished for having plundered countries like theirs—or at least they use that narrative to justify their crimes. But neither Chantal nor Tony really fits that description. The same applies in reverse: for Chantal, Africa becomes a dangerous continent populated entirely by criminals. That, too, proves false. It is Tony who dares to dig deeper, attempting to recover not just the lost money but some measure of personal truth.

Jérémy Comte’s film plays with these confusions and contradictions, sometimes plunging headfirst into them, at other times subverting expectations and showing how solidarity can emerge in places—and people—usually portrayed in a very different light. The film’s perspective is neither naïvely well-meaning nor cynical and cruel. What Paradise tries to make clear is that, despite vast differences in environment and life experience, its characters can not only connect with one another but also come to understand each other a little better—something online connections rarely manage to achieve.

While Paradise is not strictly a film about phishing, it places this troubling phenomenon front and center. The exploitation of vulnerability, low self-esteem, and loneliness emerges as a very real danger to keep in mind when forming virtual connections with strangers, no matter how many phone calls or seemingly “real” video chats are involved. Without absolving those who commit these crimes, Comte’s film attempts to look more closely at what happens on both sides of what is— in more than one sense—an unequal power relationship. Apart from a frenetic and somewhat overdone final stretch, it does so with subtlety and intelligence. In the real world, things are far more nuanced than they appear online.