Jason Sondhi
There is never a guarantee that a short film will turn out well, but the extraordinary team assembled for Mathlete amped my excitement well before I clicked play. The film brings together Ebeneza Blanche, a writer/director who is experiencing a meteoric rise in the world of music videos, with SMUGGLER, which is consistently ranked as one of the top production companies in the world. Throw in the backing of a fresh and exciting streetwear company in The New Originals and set the story in Ghana…well each of those elements alone is honestly enough for me to give a film a shot.
Obviously, we think that Mathlete, our featured film today on Short of the Week and YouTube, is worth more than a “shot”—it is not a perfect film, but is more fascinating for it. A product of Blanche’s childhood experience splitting time between the UK and Ghana, it excels in subverting accepted dualities: between Europe and Africa, between academic excellence and criminal hustling, and between poverty and fashion. For a Western audience, it is a chance to see Ghana authentically—free from a romanticizing or pathologizing eye, yet with the familiar classiness of top-tier Western production. It is an opportunity worth taking.
Emmanuel Wilberforce is a magnetic presence as the protagonist.
Emmanuel Wilberforce is our protagonist. Attending boarding school, the film begins with a voicemail message from his mother, informing him that she has been sick, unable to work, and as such will be late in making his tuition payment. Emmanuel is brilliant, but this is not the Ivy League and there is no large endowment for student aid. If he doesn’t get the money in by next week then he’s out. His instructor encourages him to enter a mathematics competition that has a sizeable prize attached to it. Problem solved right? Except for that pesky entry fee! Emmanuel’s friend, Protein has a plan though and it involves targeting the flashy guy in their dorm who has cornered the student black market.
“…my mother always said to me ‘Keep on and I’ll send you off to Ghana as punishment’. Fast forward and I find myself in Ghana attending boarding school.”
Just from the description, you can see that Blanche wishes to mix different types of stories into his pot. There is the sports story—a naive and good-hearted striver must overcome his circumstances in order to prove his worth at the competition—but this is complicated by the solution on which he lands, which is a street-level crime story of young hustlers. Emmanuel and Protein’s mark has Tupac photos on the wall and displays his wealth conspicuously in the form of chains and other jewelry. Throughout, items from the Spring ’22 collection of The New Originals pop up seamlessly, and indicate a generalized appreciation for looks and status, such as with the sweater vests that comprise the student uniform or a t-shirt that proclaims “Creatives are the New Athletes”. The virtuous desire to compete in the math event becomes inextricably wrapped up in the desires of materialism.
Mathlete, as a short, is unable to fully develop this idea, and the film’s weakness is probably trying to fit too much into its 15 minutes of runtime. However, these themes that are hinted at, the dualities that are undermined, can be linked back to Blanche’s lived experience. Blanche shares with us that he was frequently in trouble as a kid and that,
It is pop psychologizing, but the film’s status as an object between Africa and Europe, and its desire to play in-between traditional story forms thematically, surely comes from its writer/director’s own status as a creative raised between worlds? Blanche’s rise places him now within an impressive movement of Europeans of Ghanaian descent, often coming up through the world of promos—talents like Edem Wornoo, Koby Adom, and Anthony Nti. These continuing hybrid perspectives on both African and European contemporary identity should prove to be fascinating, and we can’t wait to see more.