Jason Sondhi
Gold Token, the latest addition to our catalog of selected shorts, is unusual compared to the majority of our featured films. It possesses no dialogue, its words a mix of poetry and song. Its impressionistic presentation skews experimental, hopping between eras, combining dance and found-footage. It is not an alien approach though—it is highly reminiscent of the kind of “visual albums” we’ve seen emerge from the music world. And yet, while those glossy, long-form music videos have become a terrific stylistic playground for some of today’s top image-makers, their loaded visuals and portentous signifiers are most often employed to cover up a deficit of things to say. Ewurakua Dawson-Amoah’s independent work is nearly the opposite—the themes she wants to explore are so massive that traditional narrative filmmaking could not contain them.
“I wanted to take my frustrations and compile them into something I could process creatively, in hopes that viewers could process it too.”
Amidst scenes that evoke a historical slave plantation, Dawson-Amoah uses words that reach for connection to this traumatic heritage. A Black woman of Ghanian descent, she uses stylization in an attempt for authenticity, seeking to portray the deeper truth of these ancestors lived experience, in both sorrow and joy, and uses archival footage to sketch a lineage to the present. Yet these ghosts of the past are disintermediated—they reach forward to communicate, to share their individuality and personhood, but that message is intercepted. A haunting bridge, written with Dawson-Amoah’s music collaborator, Adeleke Ode, is introduced — “they don’t see you, but they will use you. They won’t open their ears, but they love the sound…of your pain”.
As you might infer, Gold Token was inspired by the surge of activism that emerged from the death of George Floyd in 2020. While much energy and many works of art have sought to contribute to a growing awareness of concepts like police brutality and systemic racism, Dawson-Amoah found herself conflicted by much of what she saw. The nominal success of the movement to present these issues and shift them to the forefront of mainstream attention contained a dispiriting element of faddishness. The hashtags, the black-out squares, the merchandising all struck Dawson-Amoah as disingenuous—the co-option of Black pain to personal and corporate virtue-signaling absent a deeper moral commitment. The pandemic left people cooped up with nothing to do so they became social media activists. How long would that last? Gold Token emerged as an attempt to deal with these feelings. As she describes, “I wanted to take my frustrations and compile them into something I could process creatively, in hopes that viewers could process it too.”
These points and the symbology that Dawson-Amoah employs are explicated in much deeper detail in a recent interview the filmmaker conducted with Director’s Notes. While the depth of Dawson-Amoah’s thematic engagement is notable, the craft of the film is also precociously stellar. A recent grad of NYU’s film program, the film borrows heavily from contemporary music video and commercial styles, so while familiar, the presentation is accomplished. A mix of steadicam shots roving in space like a ghost punctuated by immaculately styled portraits produce powerful imagery and divide the film into distinct movements. As a whole, the piece would not be out of place on aesthetic-minded sites like NOWNESS (which indeed featured her previous film To the Girl That Looks Like Me), and Dawson-Amoah recently joined the roster at Greenpoint Pictures, home of fellow S/W alums GHOST+COW and E.J. McLeavey-Fisher.
In both its visual and thematic maturity, Gold Token is an auspicious entry in the growing filmography of a talented creator. The ability to tackle high-concept topics in a non-didactic way and with artistic integrity is a rare quality, and promises big things to come for this emerging talent. Dawson-Amoah tells us that she is currently tackling a move to genre, via a psychological thriller script that she hopes to begin development on soon.