Children of the Mountain

This award-winning feature debut by filmmaker Priscilla Anany is set in a Ghanaian community teeming with superstition and suspicion after a local woman named Essuman (Rukiyat Masud) gives birth to a boy with a cleft palate and lip, Down syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Accused of having a “dirty womb” and of being punished for delivering an out-of-wedlock child with a man already in a relationship, Essuman is all but encouraged to reject and give up her child, Nuku. Although she is indeed tempted to abandon the boy, given the revulsion of her neighbors, Essuman instead seeks a non-existent cure for Nuku's “illness” that takes her on a long, dispiriting journey in which she is susceptible to the promises of a con-man, as well as a religious charlatan who sexually exploits her, before finally reaching a medicine man. Masud delivers a powerful performance as a lone, naïve mother who must overcome her own emotional exhaustion and bouts of cynicism to care for a sometimes-unwanted child. Recommended. (T. Keogh)