EXCLUSIVE: When Oscar-winning director debuted his feature doc The Eyes of Ghana at the London Film Festival this month, it marked a welcome return to the UK capital for him and his team after scoring the project at the iconic Abbey Road Studios in August this year.
The film is Proudfoot’s first feature in a decade and comes after his two Oscar wins for short docs The Queen of Basketball and The Last Repair Shop. With The Eyes of Ghana, which counts Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as executive producers, the focus is on Chris Hesse, the 93-year-old forgotten personal cinematographer of revolutionary African leader Kwame Nkrumah.
It’s produced by Proudfoot’s Breakwater Studios and Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, and details the rise and fall of Nkrumah, a towering figure of African history who inspired the liberation of the continent in the 1950s and 1960s after rising to serve as Ghana’s first President. A political theorist and prominent African leader, Nkrumah was even featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1953.
He was later toppled by a military coup in 1966, which was allegedly backed by the CIA after he was cast a dictator. As a result, the films made during Nkrumah’s time were ordered to be burned, his name struck from Ghanaian classrooms and his monumental efforts to build a self-reliant and culturally sovereign Africa were silenced. While his name is all but erased in the U.S., Nkrumah remains an iconic and revered figure across much of Africa.
“I think his story has been intentionally erased in the West,” Proudfoot says. “People accused him of becoming a dictator, but this other story gets conflated with that. So, what our movie tries to do is tell the whole spectrum of events. Luckily, we don’t have to tell it.”
Under Nkrumah’s leadership, Ghana launched a massive state-run film industry and in between independence and the 1966 coup, more than 1,000 films were produced – everything from state visits to cultural festivals. While those films were burned, what the West never knew was that those were not the only copies of these films as Hesse had stored the vast majority of the originals safely in London, away from the political upheaval.
At the time of this interview, Proudfoot is days into scoring the film at Abbey Road Studios and the significance of recording the film at the iconic studios is not lost on him, nor is the role the city has played in this African-rooted story. “I’m aware that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” he tells Deadline in between recordings for the film by the Chineke! Orchestra, the world’s first majority-Black orchestra.
Since then, The Eyes of Ghana world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month before landing at the BFI London Film Festival earlier this month. Producers on the project are Nana Adwoa Frimpong, Proudfoot, Anita Afonu, Oscar-nominated director Moses Bwayo, Brandon Somerhalder, Ethan Lewis and Vinnie Malhotra.
Barack and Michelle Obama, John Akomfrah, Dan and Lian Gill, Max Johnson, Jonathan E. Lim, Michael Risley, Josh Rosenberg, David Treatman and Esther Wojcicki all take exec producer credits. Kris Bowers, who co-directed The Last Repair Shop with Proudfoot, composed the score of the film, blending African instrumentation with sweeping cinematic themes.
Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot. Photo by Molly O’Keefe.
First steps
Proudfoot has long been drawn to stories that explore the hidden history of an untold hero: The Queen of Basketball followed Lusia “Lucy” Harris’ unsung accomplishment as one of the greatest basketball players of all time while The Last Repair Shop followed the story of craftspeople in Los Angeles who keep 80,000 musical instruments in working order for the city’s public school students.
In The Eyes of Ghana, he approaches the material through a similar lens. Proudfoot was on assignment in Accra in 2021 filming UNICEF’s efforts to deliver billions of Covid-19 vaccines. While traveling through Ghana’s capital city with their local producer Justice Baidoo, Proudfoot noticed a grey stone-swept building on their journey and, when he asked what it was, Baidoo told him it was the mausoleum of Kwame Nkrumah.
“I had never heard the name,” says Proudfoot. “Minutes later, I learned that Nkrumah had once stood as a world leader at the heart of Africa’s dream for unity and freedom until an allegedly CIA-backed coup in 1966 removed him from power and burned every piece of evidence that he had ever existed.”
He continues: “Justice told me this story of this young man who got a scholarship to go to the U.S. and who was so proud of his heritage as a Ghanaian. He had dreamed of and fervently believed in self-determination and a free Ghana. This was at least in part inspired by the early civil rights activism that he saw in Harlem in the U.S. Nkrumah wanted to liberate Africa where Africans could speak for themselves and own property and have their own businesses and really no longer be under colonial rule, which it was.
“As the Cold War started, he wanted to remain neutral and non-aligned in that conflict and, more or less, it became too much. He was a socialist and the CIA allegedly formed a coup and knocked him out.”
Adwoa Frimpong, whose parents immigrated from Ghana to Canada, recalls growing up in Canada and hearing her parents talk frequently about Nkrumah. “I knew about him from my family but didn’t really consider him as part of the great leaders of the world just because he was never mentioned in school,” she says. “My parents had a deep respect for him, but he wasn’t part of our everyday conversations then.”
She also adds that Nkrumah’s legacy has long been the blueprint that has inspired other progressive African leaders in modern history. “He taught other African leaders how to be leaders, and he set up so many of the infrastructure elements that continue to exist in Ghana. He was a renaissance man before people knew to expect that from an African leader. Plus, he also loved film.”
Indeed, Nkrumah had a deep love of cinema and his personal cinematographer, who happened to still live in Accra, had captured the whole story. Proudfoot recalls meeting the then 90-year-old Hesse for the first time and says he is “one of the most charismatic human beings I’ve ever met.”
“Sitting in his home, he told me in hushed tones how, even though the state film archive was ordered to be burned in the coup, he had saved over a thousand reels of film from destruction – the moving image record of the continents liberation,” says Proudfoot. “He asked for help to get them digitized and shown to the world.”
Originally, Proudfoot envisioned a short documentary about Hesse, but when he consulted his friend Bwayo, the Ugandan filmmaker behind Bobi Wine: The People’s President, he convinced him to turn the film into a feature.
Chris Hesse in ‘The Eyes of Ghana’
Afonu, meanwhile, had already met Hesse while making her short documentary dubbed Perished Diamonds. She too was aware of the negatives sitting in London and had been persuading Hesse to digitize the negatives in order to safeguard a huge piece of Ghana’s history that had since been erased from the record books. “Initially, I didn’t think Chris understood what digitization meant because of the generation he came from,” she says.
But Afonu, who features in the documentary, knew the significance the films would have not only for historical records, but also for film students in Ghana. “Imagine having to go through film school and not see any of these films,” she says, recalling her own experience. “How do you, in your own country, sit through film school but are unable to see the work of earlier generations? It’s incredibly difficult. We were taught to look for our film heroes from outside of our own home.”
With Afonu aboard the project, she was able to bring years of archival knowledge and advocacy to the team. Producer-cinematographer Somerhalder, who had already worked with Proudfoot on The Queen of Basketball also joined the project and was able to secure access to one of only a handful of IMAX 65mm cameras in existence (via the support of John Turner at IMAX) to shoot the film.
Higher Ground
The personal connection between Barack Obama and The Eyes of Ghana also runs deep. Nkrumah mentored Tom Mboya, a leader of Kenya’s independence movement. Mboya would go on to mentor Barack Obama Sr., who came to the U.S. on a scholarship and thus setting the course for his son, who would eventually become the U.S.’s first African American President.
Proudfoot notes that the film includes Hesse’s footage of Nkrumah holding a conference for the eight free African nations and the chair of the conference is Mboya.
“There’s a direct connection beweeen Kwame Nkrumah and the first African American President of the United States,” says Proudfoot. “It’s a huge, historic, full circle moment.”
Proudfoot recalls when he first showed the film to Barack Obama, the former President’s initial feedback was that it “reminded him of how hard it is to run a country.”
“But he also had the insight that it’s important to judge Kwame Nkrumah’s record as the leader of the African independence movement, which was very successful and his record as the leader of the bureaucracy of the Ghanaian government.”
The Eyes of Ghana is continuing its fall festival run at the Chicago International Film Festival, Cameraimage, AFI and more.
