$75,000

$75,000

Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

VERDICT: First person testimonies and 3D modelling are effectively combined in Moïse Togo’s harrowing short documentary about the horrific violence faced by albino people across Africa.

The title of Moïse Togo’s distressing documentary $75,000 is a reference to an estimate given for the potential price for a full albino skeleton in certain places in Africa. With the endurance of beliefs about the potency of certain of their body parts in witchcraft rituals, African albinos are regularly the victims of gruesome assaults. In the film, Togo includes interviews with several people who relay the circumstances surrounding attacks, from those mutilated with machetes to a mother whose baby was ripped from her arms.

In addition to the upsetting nature of the issue it highlights, $75,000 is striking because of the imagery employed by the filmmaker. Using a mixture of photogrammetry – the process of mapping a three-dimensional digital space from photographs – and computer animation, Togo has created a disconcerting, computerised landscape within which ghostly snapshots of the traumas suffered by the interviewees are represented. This allows the film to stimulate a visceral reaction and focus the audience’s attention on the emotion of the moment being recounted while avoiding the risk of sensationalising the violence that traditional recreation could bring.

This technique also allows for a transition early in the film in which the camera goes from gliding across pale skin in extreme close-up to floating the digital city streets. The cracks and grooves of the skin morph into the rocky divots in a road, creating a motif of the albino body as a topographical site of violence as well its intended target. It’s unlikely that anyone hearing these accounts will forget them quickly regardless, but the visuals of $75,000 give its harrowing stories a haunting longevity.

Director, screenplay: Moïse Togo
Production companies: Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains (France)
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Short Film Program)
In Bamabara, Fon and Yoruba
14 minutes