The first voice you hear in Larry Achiampong’s new film, Wayfinder, is that of his eight-year-old daughter, Zael. “The beginning of every story starts at the end of another,” she says, with the endearing hesitancy of a young reader approaching a sentence for the first time. “This story starts at the end of a world we once knew.”
The words are intended by the British-Ghanaian multimedia artist to evoke the language of fairytales and science fiction, but also to capture the dystopian, end-of-days tenor of the past few years. However, delivered by Zael, against a black title screen, they are made strange, removed from the familiar language of the art world and placed within the context of family, childhood and bedtime stories.
