The boy at the centre of Netflix’s first original feature film was found playing football in Accra. Abraham Attah had never acted before he was cast as Agu, a child soldier in Beasts of No Nation. In September 2015, he won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor at the Venice Film Festival.
The novel
The film is based on the 2005 novel by Uzodinma Iweala, a Nigerian American writer. It tells the story of Agu, a boy in an unnamed West African country whose family is torn apart by civil war. He is captured by a rebel unit and forced to become a soldier under a charismatic commander.
Shot in Ghana
Director Cary Joji Fukunaga shot the film in Ghana, using locations in the eastern part of the country. Many of the supporting actors and crew were Ghanaian. Filming was difficult, with heat, illness and the challenges of shooting in remote areas.
Idris Elba as the Commandant
Idris Elba, the British actor whose mother is Ghanaian and father from Sierra Leone, played the Commandant, the rebel leader who becomes both father figure and abuser to Agu. Elba was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a Screen Actors Guild Award for best supporting actor.
Abraham Attah
Attah’s performance carried the film. He was praised for his natural presence and emotional range, and he won awards in Venice and from America’s National Board of Review. He went on to appear in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Netflix’s first
The film was Netflix’s first original feature, released on the platform and in a limited number of cinemas on the same day in October 2015. Some cinema chains refused to show it because of the simultaneous streaming release, a sign of the tension between streaming and traditional cinema at the time.
The Ghana Movie Awards
The film was nominated in several categories at the 2015 Ghana Movie Awards. Fukunaga asked for it to be withdrawn, saying it was a film shot in Ghana for an international audience rather than a Ghanaian film. The episode raised questions about what counts as Ghanaian cinema.
Its place
Beasts of No Nation is hard to watch, with scenes of violence and abuse. It is also one of the most honest Hollywood portrayals of child soldiers. For Ghana, it showed that the country could host a major international production, and it introduced a young Ghanaian actor to the world.
