This time around my Letterboxd Map journey takes me to Togo for Ashakara.
Title: Ashakara
Director: Gérard Louvin
Released: January 1, 1991 (Theatrical – Togo)
Runtime: 1 hour 38 minutes
A viral outbreak is resisting Western medicine, and village elder Dodi (Gbegnedji Yawavi) has a remedy: fermented roots steeped with a sacred stone that keeps regenerating the supply. The local doctor, Dr. Kara (James Campbell), confirms it works and is excited to get the cure into the hands of his village.
Unfortunately, a pharmaceutical company has also noticed. They dispatch biologist Dr. Jérôme Blanc (Jean-Marc Pasquet) to make sure an affordable, locally-produced cure never reaches the market.
Togo doesn’t have a large filmmaking footprint, so there’s already something appealing about this one just existing.
The landscapes are unfamiliar in the best way, and the village scenes are easily the best parts of the film. The cast gels well, and Dr. Kara is a highlight from beginning to end. It’s also shot well, having an almost warm early-’80s television quality to it.
Within the first ten minutes it establishes capitalism and greed as the villain, as true now as it was then.
Ashakara caught me by surprise. Not because I had low expectations but because I had no idea what to expect.
Sure, the technology Jérôme uses to intercept communications is pretty hokey, even for the early ’90s, but that’s easy to look past. The bigger issue is the character of Jérôme himself. Not the actor, the character. He exists solely as a white savior, and the film doesn’t really push back on that at all. It’s the one thing that works against it.
Though don’t let that stop you from checking this out. If you have the opportunity, it’s definitely worth at least one viewing.