The High Life
2023 · 9m · Ghana
Directed by Andy Madjitey
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, musical
Tones: contemplative, tender
After her stepfather's death, a young woman inherits a box of unlabelled vinyl records and goes on a journey of discovery and music.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A grief-inheritance-vinyl journey reads like a Hallmark treatment, and Madjitey somehow dodges that entirely—but I'd need to see where the film actually *breaks* the coming-of-age template to know if it's subversion or just competent restraint.
The film moves within a well-established lineage of music-as-memory narratives, and its formal restraint—letting vinyl and silence do the emotional work—suggests a director fluent in that tradition's grammar.
The unlabelled records as a structuring device is elegant, but what likely elevates this is how Madjitey uses *silence between songs* or a single editing choice around the moment she first plays a record—the decision that transforms inheritance into revelation rather than plot.