Ghana’s shoestring film industry struggles in a post-Covid, post-DVD world

“Action!” comes the call. Four actors are fighting. The leading man’s character is ostensibly there because his boss is looking for love, and has hired him to go to a woman’s village and test her loyalty, to see if she remains faithful.

There are two cameramen – one with a jumper over his head to keep his monitor visible under the blaring sun – and a sound guy carrying a boom mic. Crowds of children have gathered behind, the cameramen occasionally shushing them. A baby starts to cry.

The actors are unclear whether they are filming for a movie or a TV show. They also don’t know how the story will end. Mainly, they are conscious that they need to do as few takes as possible, as they will be paid only for the final product, not the extra days it may take to shoot scenes they mess up. This is Kumawood, the film industry in Kumasi, Ghana, where films are produced at speed. Usually, they film a whole movie, or four episodes of a TV show, in five days.

Tina Safo (26) is both a producer and lead actor. She says she wants the finished product to be a movie. This will be the fourth she has produced and starred in, making her relatively new to the industry, but that is no barrier if she can raise the funding herself.

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The full cost will come to a little over €1,000: money Safo raised by trading in clothes. The idea for the script was hers, and she hired the crew and cast herself. They work from 8am to 6.30pm, and Safo anticipates filming will take five days. Editing will take five more. Then, she hopes, she can get the film aired on a Ghanaian TV station, sell it on DVDs and maybe upload it to her new YouTube channel, which she is just learning how to use. “It’s my talent,” she says. “I feel great.”

Ghana’s Ghallywood

It is almost a century since filmmaking and screenings began in the former British colony of Gold Coast, in what is now Ghana. After independence, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, nationalised film production, and documentaries focused on creating a sense of unity and national pride, such as 1960′s Answer for Tomorrow, which explained the reasons behind a national census, were created. The country’s first feature film, No Tears For Ananse, was an adaptation of a local folktale, released in 1968.

More recently, the west African country’s film industry has often been referred to as Ghallywood. It is productive but less well known than Nollywood in Nigeria, where many Ghanaian actors relocate for fame and fortune. But Ghallywood, which is mostly based in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, has more of a focus on creating English-language content, which can be viewed by an international audience, according to filmmakers in Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city and the capital of the Ashanti Region.

In contrast, the Kumasi-based Kumawood focuses on local storylines, village settings, and actors who speak local languages: usually Twi. It has more in common with other extremely low budget African filmmaking efforts and industries such as Uganda’s Wakaliwood, where a film crew are said to make action comedies for as little as $200.

In a small office in central Kumasi sits Samuel Darko, the 48-year-old chief executive of Kumawood TV. He has been working in the film industry for 25 years, acting in films, TV series, and advertisements, as well as writing scripts, editing, filming and directing. “I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved and we are still going,” he says.

Darko was there at the beginning of Kumawood, a name he claims to have coined, and has watched “so many actors” come of age through the industry. They learned to create films quickly, on the lowest budget possible, because of the lack of government support and other investment.

“We could make a movie in a week, even [in] three days,” he recalls. Their films and TV series became wildly popular because they showed the life of regular Ghanaians: “everything that goes on around us; their day-to-day activities, it was relating to [the audience].” They would screen after church on Sundays, when people would be at home with their families.

But the past four years have proven a major challenge, because of the growth of social media and the move away from DVDs. Many producers are switching their efforts towards creating short video clips, which work better online, whereas long Twi-language films have not proven as popular.

“Now the industry is almost collapsed,” Darko says. “We normally market films through CDs, but the CD players aren’t in the system any more. During this shift to social media, we haven’t been making movies.”

Many local actors don’t speak English or lack the contacts to become more “international”, Darko adds. Each film costs up to 30,000 cedis (about €3,500) to make, if “big stars” are cast, making them non-viable. So he’s focusing on shooting TV adverts instead, while running a 24-hour TV channel with a staff of eight which airs live discussions and screens old Kumawood movies in between. Sitting with Darko is Francis Addai, a 36-year-old radio presenter known as DJ Lofty, who says he earns money making alcohol commercials.

Darko invited foreign film crews to come to Kumasi to make productions there. “Ghana is a good place to be an actor. We have very good storylines, we have a lot of people willing to do the job, but we need investors,” says Darko. “In Ghana we are friendly. People can host you and do everything you need to make good movies.”

100,000 employed

James Aboagye, the president of Film Producers Association of Ghana, has been in his role for two and a half years, after a career where he worked on more than 80 films as a director, producer and writer. Aboagye sees his job as advocating for better distribution opportunities and investment. Around 100,000 people are employed directly by the Ghanaian film industry and more than one million indirectly, he says. Ghana has a population of roughly 32 million.

Before the pandemic Aboagye says there were hundreds of films released annually, but then cinemas were closed for more than a year. In Kumasi there is one big cinema with four halls, and Accra has six, with up to five screens in each, but hotels screen recent movie releases too. Tickets cost around 25 cedis (€3), he says.

“We need serious investment in terms of equipment, capacity building and other things,” Aboagye adds, sitting in an artist’s workshop in Patasi, a suburb of Kumasi. “If we keep the industry going, there are lots of opportunities for young people. The government is very supportive of the arts but not as much as we would like.”

For each film targeted at an international audience, he estimates, there are about 10 made for domestic consumption. About 5,000 films created since the 1990s aren’t available on any streaming platforms, which he would like to see change. While huge companies such as Netflix have shown interest in acquiring more from the Ghanaian film industry, they set conditions, such as minimum standards regarding sound quality and resolution, which Aboagye says can be too much of a challenge for local filmmakers. “So we do not want to focus on them,” he said.

“The dream is to have our own streaming platform. We have our plans on paper, now we are looking for the investment. We would gather all the movies from our members and put them there, and every month there would be some royalty and the number of times your movie is streamed, that’s what you get.”

He says the new platform would cost $5 million, which he doesn’t think is a lot of money “to fix a national problem”. Apart from among Ghanaians, he believes the streaming service would find a market across Africa, and among Africans across the rest of the world. “We’ve approached the government but we’re being sceptical because of the conditions attached. We want an independent [platform], not [one that’s] government-controlled. We will put a team to manage it but we don’t want to become a mouthpiece.”

His hopes come amid a nationwide discussion about the role of the creative arts industry in Ghana. President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo won the 2016 election after making promises about giving the industry increased support. As part of that, Aboagye points out, the Ghanaian government is supporting the creation of a creative arts secondary school in nearby Kwadaso, Kumasi, with the country’s education minister, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, announcing last year: “When we talk about the next Michael Jackson of the world, this is where they will be nurtured and this is where the whole world will come and recruit African talents.”

Talent

Back on the Kumasi film set, Mary Antwi (42) says that one of the joys of Kumawood is you don’t need an education to get involved, just talent. She has been in more than 30 productions, though roles aren’t as frequent as she would like. In this film, she is playing the mother of a lead character.

Antwi likes that the films capture traditional culture at a time when it is being affected by urbanisation. “We are trying to reclaim [the culture],” she says. It took her a while to get used to improvising, but now she says she has no problem with it.

Her colleague, Fiifi Robertson (43), estimates he has shot more than 200 films in 16 years. But even after all that time, Robertson recommends having a side business as movie work can fall through. “When you’re not being called, it means you’re not going to be paid… Even getting transport can be a problem.”

One lead role is played by Collins Otenj, who goes by the stage name Okomfour Kolage and is famous for playing a fetish priest – a person who mediates between spirits and the living. That work is dangerous, he says: he once became sick when a spirit arrived on set, attracted by his acting. The 37-year-old has been an actor for 15 years, and he gets paid a fixed rate of 3,000 cedis (€360) for each film or TV episode.

Kumasi is the best place to be based, he says, as there is so much being filmed all the time. He works most weeks, with a day or two off to recover. He usually doesn’t receive scripts in advance, and a lot of his performances involve improvisation. The fast nature of Kumawood’s film industry means that sometimes a plot may not even be finalised when filming begins, and will develop as the work goes on. “Your talent will take over,” Otenj explains.

The greatest challenge now is social media, he says, which has destroyed Kumawood’s traditional movie-selling models, because Ghanaians can watch whatever they want on their phones without paying for it.

“Right now our biggest problem is we need investors. Our industry is in a kind of crisis, so we are all working so hard, we are all praying for movie investors to come and support our industry. If the industry collapses, you can imagine the number of people who are going to be jobless,” Otenj says.

Film is important because it influences the masses, he adds. For example, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, he says, they made a film about someone who wouldn’t wear a mask, got infected, and then died after bringing “crisis to the family”. Otenj played the dead man’s brother, who kept advising him to mask up. It was a way to spread public-health messages.

Apart from that, “there’s a lot of stress in the country”, Otenj says, which films can play a role in relieving. “We try to bring happiness and laughter to the people, and if you save even a soul it’s a privilege for you.”