Sakawa seemed to be positively received in its North American premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. This Dutch-produced documentary profiles young internet fraudsters in Ghana who desperately engage in variety of online sex schemes with lonely Westerners. Sometimes they perform online sex acts and attempt to get the Westerners in the US, UK, Canada and elsewhere to send them money or plane tickets. It is a disturbing and troubling picture of what desperate people in the third world will do when they have no real economic opportunities. It reflects the international hierarchy of politics and economics played out in a very a disturbing human microcosm. These young people have become human commodities as developed countries continue to exploit the developing world economically in the post-colonial era. The documentary is made in a cinema verité style and lacks any real contextualization. The documentary could have been strengthened by some expert analysis of the history of colonization, economics, and the international sex trade in order to help the viewers gain more nuanced understanding of the tragic events rather than just an emotional picture. Sakawa is provocative and well-filmed, but feels like an incomplete experiment.