Although some French-speaking countries in west Africa have developed small cinema industries producing feature films for Western arthouse cinemas, Ghana has focused its filmmaking energies on its lively domestic market. The industry produces about 50 features a year - of necessity on exceptionally low budgets, with the films shot on video instead of film to further shave costs.
These days, there are no true cinemas left in Ghana: all of the remaining movie palaces now use video equipment to show local product or the occasional American action movie. Most of the country's video halls, though, are a little more rough and ready than traditional cinemas - just a darkened room packed to capacity with kitchen chairs. As people take their seats there's on occasional crash as someone misses a step in the darkness and the screen is often criss-crossed with wires from the projector that no one has ever thought to tuck away. In the smallest towns, the video "halls" are just a backyard with an elderly television and 50 people crowded around - with goats and sheep underfoot. Despite the primitive conditions, though, they are lucrative businesses since so few households have a television set.
Ghanaian audiences are notably enthusiastic participants, often making comments to the characters onscreen and reacting wildly to the mildest hint of titillation. However, like the lurid Ghanaian tabloid newspapers, the action is almost all verbal, with the camera a model of chaste discretion.
At the tiny offices of Miracle Films in Kumasi, Ghana's second city, dozens of workers - mostly schoolkids making pocket money and unceremoniously ordering the white man out of the way - were buzzing around last week with stacks of cassettes of Miracle's big new movie, Sika, a comedy on village life. Videos are released in the video halls and in shops simultaneously: although this reduces ticket sales at the "cinemas", it's the only way for the producers to avoid the immediate appearance of pirate videos. The tapes sell for about £2, a large sum of money by local standards, but still low enough to ensure brisk sales of the hit titles.
The manager at Miracle was confident he'd make a killing with Sika, since the trailer has been provoking gales of laughter in the video halls - perhaps not least because it's one of the few coherent previews currently being shown. The company's big worry is competition from the high-profile melodrama Singing My Life. The trailer for Singing My Life is also notably well-constructed. But its promises of intrigue, laughs and high passion are sorely betrayed by the film itself, a reactionary little tale about a rape victim who gets little sympathy from the courts or the film-makers.
The biggest threat to the success of both films, however, is the influx of movies from Nigeria, aggressively marketed and especially popular in northern Ghana. The Nigerians produce about 150 videos annually, and in recent years some Ghanaian producers have started to cut their losses, teaming up with Nigerian companies to co-produce films and break into the lucrative Nigerian market, with more than 100 million people.
THE extra financing for such co-productions may also boost production values of the videos, which are generally poor, with amateurish acting, incoherent plotting and abrupt endings (The Other Twin, which features both Ghanaian and Nigerian actors, may be acknowledging this problem when it promises "suspense, confusion, intrigue").
There are some encouraging signs, however, that the Ghanaian industry is beginning to serve as a training ground for more skilled film-makers. Director Tom Ribeiro made the mildly nonsensical drug/hoodlum drama, Set on Edge, in 1999, but has already graduated to co-directing the more polished Rituals of Fire, one of the films in the main competition at the recent pan-African film festival in Burkina- Faso (the festival known for many years as "the Cannes of Africa"). Ribeiro has also kept a hand in the Ghanaian video industry: his film, The Village Court, will "make ripples" this spring according to one local critic.
The Village Court tackles a common theme: traditional beliefs and the spirit world - and how such beliefs are sustained and adapted in a modernising society. The main character invokes a fetish priest to assist him in his unscrupulous efforts to inherit his father's farm - in opposition to the rituals of his ethnic group, the Akan, in which property passes to a nephew, not a son. The moral message in Ghanaian videos is rarely far from the surface and, sure enough, the unscrupulous use of the spirit world only makes the situation worse for the young man.
Such moralising often seems heavy-handed to outsiders, but it's not always devoid of humour. When one of the many drug dealers from Set on Edge complains, unconvincingly, that he has turned to crime in order to support his large family, a policeman snaps, "Have you never heard of family planning?" In any case, the moralising rings true in Ghana, with its strongly religious current: these are films made for local tastes, and although Ghana's French-speaking neighbours may produce award-winning art films, they rarely end up on screens in the countries where they are made.
