Ghanaian Director Amartei Armar's Debut 'Our Time Will Come' Earns Variety Review After Locarno Premiere
Variety has published its review of 'Our Time Will Come', the feature debut of Ghanaian writer-director Amartei Armar, following the film's world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival. The film, a Ghana-France co-production, runs 105 minutes and is classified as a drama on MUBI (Variety).
The story takes elements of Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist' and relocates them to West Africa. Two siblings — fifteen-year-old Owusu, played by Idrissu Tontie Jr., and seven-year-old Adobea, played by Dorothy Adobea Tandoh — flee an orphanage and travel to Accra to find their long-lost mother (Variety). MUBI's synopsis adds that the protagonist's father is unknown and that he was abandoned by his mother (MUBI).
The Dickens parallels run through the supporting cast as well. Emmanuel Wilberforce plays Ziggy, a figure Variety likens to the Artful Dodger — the street-smart pickpocket who befriends Oliver in the original novel. O'Bryan Nana Kwame Enyan plays Obolo, a street kid with an eye patch, and Barbara Yong-Jin plays Suga, the only girl in the street group (Variety). Behind the camera, cinematographer John Kwame Markin shot the film.
'Our Time Will Come' arrived at Locarno under a different name. The festival's official programme listed it as 'Ego Reach We All (Our Time Will Come)', scheduling it as a world premiere in its 2026 production slate (Variety; Locarno Film Festival). Before that, the project passed through Marrakech's Atlas Workshops in 2025 under the working title 'Vagabonds' — the same name as Armar's 2018 short film, according to MUBI (MUBI). Armar also directed the short 'Tsutsue' in 2022.
Two days before the Variety review went live, MMM Film Sales announced it had acquired worldwide rights to the film ahead of its Locarno premiere (Cineuropa). Worldwide rights, in industry terms, mean the sales agent handles the film across all territories — shopping it to distributors market by market. For a first-time feature director from Ghana, securing a sales agent before a festival premiere is a meaningful step: it signals that the film already has commercial traction before critics have had their say.
The Variety review, published on 9 August 2026, puts Armar's debut in front of an international industry audience at a moment when the film is moving from festival launch into the sales cycle. How widely it reaches screens beyond the festival circuit will depend on the deals MMM Film Sales can close in the coming months.
