Danish novelist and documentarian Daniel Dencik spent years working in partnership with Ghanan producer Kwame Boadi to bring the long-forgotten, amazing true story of botanist Wulff Joseph Wulff to life. It all may have taken place nearly 200 years ago, but this fascinating, unnerving story speaks to human nature in our own times.

The forward-thinking Danes were the first Europeans—in 1792!—to officially ban the slave trade. Yet something rotten persisted in the state of Denmark, that is, far away in Denmark’s West African colonies, where the practice of indenturing and abusing indigenous people into servitude continued well into the 19th century. It was into this brutal reality that the naïve Wulff arrived in the 1830s. His determination to establish a viable commercial coffee plantation was soon overshadowed by the more pressing moral challenge to confront the horrific racist practices of the corrupt Danes that ruled the colony.

Gold Coast is a hallucinatory epic, containing some of the most euphoric images to be found at this year’s Festival. Dencik has stated that his intention was to offer a vision of “1836 on ecstasy,” and the fever-dream-like result seizes both the rugged beauty of the wild terrain and the radical beauty of the human soul spurred into action. – Jaie Laplante