The Eyes of Ghana

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Chris Hesse was the personal cameraman to Ghana’s revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah. That made him an eyewitness to Africa’s tumultuous liberation movement away from colonialist rule. In 1966 Nkrumah was deposed in a coup and his rivals sought to destroy all his filmed records. But Hesse found a way to preserve over 1,300 reels. They’ve scarcely been seen since they were filmed.

As Hesse nears the end of his life, we watch him share his legacy with the young Ghanaian filmmaker Anita Afonu, whose passion for cinema burns as brightly as his. In his first feature length film, two-time Oscar-winner Ben Proudfoot has created a warm and celebratory movie which throws welcome light on the history of Africa in the mid-20th century.

Curators’ note:

“Chris Hesse’s memories and the lens-based media he amassed during his years as the personal documentarian of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, come into sharp focus as a fading history that must be recovered from the archives. Through these rediscovered images, we experience how government policies and the tides of political ideas shaped a collective consciousness of unity and history among the people of Ghana.”

Mar 31: Zoom Q&A with director Ben Proudfoot

The Eyes of Ghana is simultaneously a tribute to the way movies can change the world, a postmortem for a nation’s film industry (a lack of which Hesse believes has permanently hindered its identity), and a portrait of two men who were with Ghana from the very beginning […] Cinema is magical, and storytelling is vital. Clichéd as these tropes might be, they work for a reason, and it’s hard to walk away from The Eyes of Ghana without a spring in your step caused by the 90-minute love fest for this incredible medium.

Christian Zilko, IndieWire

Having two great filmmakers match each other’s brainwaves makes this excavation of cinematic history a deeply moving examination of the power of documentary films. It’s an exceptional human portrait with a wider lens.

Pat Mullen POV magazine

A touching paean to the power of the artform and the people behind it.

Murtada Elfadi, Variety