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Afonu, Anita, and Dan Hodgkinson. 2025. Ghana’s Cinematic Past: An Interview with Dr Jim Fara Panbonor Awindor. Interview conducted by Dr Dan Hodgkinson and Anita Afonu. Self-produced. 32 mins. Archived online on Nakala:
https://doi.org/10.34847/NKL.035BYYGQ
1In 1977, the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC), founded during the post-independence years of Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency, was divested to a private Malaysian company under the guise of rebuilding it as an enhanced institution for television production. The privatisation of GFIC lead to many changes in the way films were made in Ghana and resulted in the unfortunate destruction of Ghana’s film heritage when a collection of GFIC films were abandoned by the new company. The film industry under Kwame Nkrumah had been used to counter the negative representation of Ghanaians by colonialists and to show Ghana to the world in a more positive light. Ghana, which once had a burgeoning film industry is now a show of its former self. The visionary studio that supported the independent filmmakers with state-sponsored projects, no longer exists.
2In this video interview, Jim Awindor, the director of the Ghana Academy of Film and Television Arts discusses Kwame Nkrumah’s use if cinema as a revolutionary tool to educate Ghanaians and showcase Ghana after independence to the world. Awindor discusses the various political shifts that took place after independence and the events that led to the controversial sale of GFIC. He also discusses the need for the establishment of Ghana Academy of Film & Television Arts (GAFTA) and its role in fostering a community of professional filmmakers committed to industry standardisation and cultural preservation.
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[00:43:14-08:22:18]
Anita Afonu (A. A.): Tell us a bit about who you are (i.e historic positions and position now)
Jim Fara, Panbonor Awindor (J. A.): I am Jim Fara, Panbonor Awindor, I hold an MFA in Film and Video and also a PhD in Endogenous Development. These are quite because my interest in film took me on a certain journey and that journey was something that was precipitated by my interest in drama so drama was a thing that introduced me to the film art form and I’m glad I did that transition because my likeness or affinity towards drama was a thing that helped me to understand what film was so for me, it was a good transition because at the end of it all, I felt that to be able to do what I actually wanted, film could achieve that fully because with drama which is place specific, whatever you did, yes people will see it, but film had the ability to be shown in so many places to so many people even at the same time and it could stay as a product for a while so that you can always use it and reuse it again and again so that in effect, you know, was something that interested me so I went to NAFTI and then I studied Film Directing and from there I got to realise how deficient the non-fiction aspect was the thing that was trending at that time, but it interested me to see how the factual aspect of filmmaking was deficient in the curriculum of NAFTI. So that took me to Columbia College to study Documentary filmmaking, luckily enough I got a Fulbright Scholarship that gave me that opportunity to study documentary filmmaking. So that got me to study documentary filmmaking which brought me back to NAFTI to make it a specialising course because then, it wasn’t.
So my interest in film in general also got me into the politics of it or you would say the kind of position film found itself in this country had a lot of political ramifications and for me, I thought that what legacies Kwame Nkrumah had put in place, we should not let that die. So it was one of those things that brought us to the formation of GAFTA, the Ghana Academy of Television Arts [see below “The Constitution of Film and Television Arts” 2012], which our seniors then like Chris Hesse, Ernest Abbeyquaye, Martin Loh, Bill Marshall, Ashong Katai, and others, you know, we got to found this association. And the reason behind it was is because at a certain particular time, I think it was 1986, the government divested the Ghana Film Corporation to a Malaysian concern and the idea at that time was that they were going to revamp the film industry which we all bought into but when it was inaugurated in 1997, we realised that it was just a Television Station so for us as filmmakers or should I say, custodians of that film legacy because this thing was something that was passed down, we felt that if we were unionised, we had formed something that as a pressure group, maybe it would have been difficult for the government to just whisk it away, you know, because for us, that was our birthright, it was a place that we congregated, it was a place that served as the epitome of the film industry in Ghana so for it to just go away like that, it made the film industry suffer certain ramifications so gaps were created and it was something that would affect us for a long time which we’re still feeling it today because it truncated the growth of the film industry once that was gone.
So for me, forming GAFTA was the one thing we thought that we could use it as a political pressure group to get certain policies done through our advocacy or through our lobbying with the political leaders in place and Ghana has a very interesting political life or should I say a political organisation but Ghana…the political landscape of Ghana is such an interesting one in the sense that you don’t have a blueprint that works through all the political parties so what happens is that when you make certain gains in terms of advocacy, in terms of lobbying and all that and there’s a change of government, you should consider all that gone, you know, and that’s what had happened to us all these years. We had formed GAFTA in 2001 and we tried to get the Film Act revised, the Film Act promulgated and it never happened because anytime there was change of government, we had to start all over again so it took us more than 20 years to get this film act promulgated and that has taken us so far back in trying to get the film industry working as it should so GAFTA was very instrumental in this preparation towards feeding in into or putting inputs into the Film Bill and then later on it was promulgated as an Act. And we’re glad that they did because of that we have in place now what we call the National Film Authority, they’re supposed to see the workings of the industry. We’re just hoping that it follows what is inside the Act to the letter because right now we are not seeing it so much but once it is there, we know that we can still lobby for whatever we have to do to get it running so in short, that’s how I later got to be President of GAFTA because our senior who was Chris Hesse had to step down and I became President of GAFTA.
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[08:23:06-15:02:05]
A. A.: In what way is Ghana’s film history different to other African states? How did it begin and what was special about it?
J. A.: The Ghana Film Industry, I would say is something that began with our first president because before then, we had what we call the Colonial Film Unit, that turned into the Ghana film Unit and then later on the Ghana Film Industry and then the Ghana Film Industry Corporation so its gone through several phases. So when we start to talk about the Ghana Film industry, yes we can just say that it began with the president of Ghana when he decided to create a film industry for Ghana so we can say that’s how it began and they have two reasons why this was so important to him, for him as president who had understood what film could do or what film had done in other countries like the US or the Soviet Union or in UK or in France and all that. He understood the reasons why he needed to have the same kind of facility in Ghana because all these films that were made before then I would say, the Colonial Films didn’t give us a good representation so there was something that was dehumanising about those films that they made about us. The gaze was all demeaning, you know, and we needed to use that same instrument to redeem ourselves, to make films that will give us a good representation, so he had to nationalise it. He had to make Cinema a national culture and that was for that reason to strive to redeem our lost image to redeem the images that were plundered and dehumanised.
So he started by making sure that the africans or the Ghanaians so Kwame Nkrumah was such a person who was so much a believer in Pan Africanism and he himself had proclaimed at the beginning of our independence, on Independence Day where in his speech he said that Africans are capable of doing their own thing you know, it was not for nothing, it was something he believed in so much so you realise that he wanted to show that the African could do things so the film industry was a place where he made sure that the people who worked there were Africans and he made sure that they had good training so it was not like just putting people together to say “Hey look, here’s a camera, just start shooting”, no. These people trained in the UK, they trained in Poland, they trained in the Soviet Union and they trained in the United States. He made sure that he sent them all around to have training so that when they came back, they would have known the skills, known the language of film, know how to construct and deconstruct what was going on so his ideology and motive behind it was purposeful because he knows that or he knew that it was a great task because if you don’t understand Panafricanism, you didn’t understand how to decolonize things that were already place and working, then you’ll find it difficult to construct your own image so it was important to be able to have the ingredients to be able to construct your own image, that is how you can redeem yourself from that lost image that the colonial films had already situated us. So it was important that he did that so these films were, the films that were made, even though it was seminal, but it was beginning to kind of get things done in the right way so newsreels were made, things about us, things about our culture, things about the importance of living together, unity, things about Panafricanism, opening our eyes to other African countries and making sure that we understood what was going on in in the African continent and all that, offering our arms to or our hands and relationships to other African countries, he made sure all those things were filmed so even, I quite remember when we were having the first…when we just got Television and we had acquired our first set of Television equipment with our OB Van and all that, that was when he was holding the first African Union meeting in Ghana. They had had one in Ethiopia that was the beginning of it, but there was one that was supposed to happen in Ghana in 1963 and we were supposed to cover it and interestingly what they said he did was that he made sure that the planes that were handled by Ghanaians you know, was shown in these countries if they go to pick some people, that they made sure that the pilots were Ghanaians and African to give a sense that we could do things by ourselves. When the people arrived in Ghana, they also made sure that those who worked on Television were Ghanaians even though we know there was some assistance somewhere but he didn’t make any white man seen but only Ghanaians seen working on Television to prove a point so that’s how subtle his purpose was that whatever we were seen to be doing was done by us.
[15:03:04-20:26:13 ]
A. A.: What were the various eras of Ghana’s films? How did this correspond to the political shifts in the country?
- 1 See a list of notable films of Kwaw Ansah and Tom Ribeiro in the Filmography at the end of this art (...)
J. A.: Unfortunately for us Kwame Nkrumah didn’t stay too long, he came in 1957, by the time Ghana Film Industry and the Television took root, it was already 1963,1964,1965, it was a period where when all these things was established, then he had to go in 1966 so we didn’t get to see much of the fruits of what he intended the film industry to be but remnants of it could be seen in the military governments that took place and for them, they didn’t have an ideology, they didn’t have a plan, they didn’t have a purpose, they were not seen as PanAfricanists, they were just there to remove Kwame Nkrumah and then rule the best way they could and because of that we have no direction, we didn’t have culture policies, we didn’t have anything that would say “look, Ghana, with this our direction this is where we’re going” or even this ideology because they spend most of the time to erase Kwame Nkrumah from the face of Ghana and on earth if they could. So if you check when the time that Kwame Nkrumah came, like I was saying, I mean Alexei Tcheuyap says that “it’s impossible to examine nationalism without establishing the link between colonialism and cinema”.
Kwame Nkrumah understood that. Nationalism is something which is nation applied and if we were founded or everything that we did was something that emanated from a colonial perspective and we didn’t nationalise ourselves or liberated ourselves to a stage where we could recognise this colonists thought and to decolonize what was existing, we wouldn’t have a direction, we wouldn’t have our own identity, we wouldn’t have anything that we hold as our own so the first thing he did was to make sure that we recognise that so that was the first trend.
Then the second trend was to make sure that we made films that spoke about us, that represented us, that gave us a good light and we never had the opportunity to have private individuals, that’s at the beginning, making films like you go to Senegal, you had Ousman Sembene, Burkinabe, you had Idriss and co and all those guys who had the opportunity to make a lot of films. The British never gave us that opportunity to be able to make a lot of films so we started with government owned nationalist film industry and that could only have been driven by government policy and all that and of course we didn’t have the luxury of building a nation and having a lot of money to be pushing in film. Yes we could, you know, do something but we couldn’t have done it in a way that would surpass anybody anywhere in any country, we’ll just start little by little, that’s how we started.
So we started by giving ourselves the chance to represent ourselves in various ways so that’s how it started before he was ousted. There were a few coproductions Ghana did with other countries, that’s in the 60s and 80s, we had the opportunity to do…and that was to keep the film industry running. So those coproductions, many came from Germany so that’s what we did. And then later on we had in the early 80s and late 80s, Kwaw Ansah and the Tom Ribeiros and all that,1 they started to make their own films using the facilities at Ghana Films. So yes his ousting kind of truncated the progress and it became a slow movement for the film industry to exist so we moved slowly and to the point where government realised that or not just government but because of IMF conditionalities you know… the corporations and government businesses in Ghana had to be divested and it affected the Ghana Film Industry and the story goes, it was divested to Malaysians and that was it. So that ended the hopes of a great leader who thought we could use film to do a lot of things, give us a certain kind of representation.
[20:27:03-23:12:13]
A. A.: Did Ghana Films practise a particular type of filmmaking?
J. A.: I wouldn’t say yes because it was still teething. Teething in the sense that it was trying to find it’s place. You know, let’s not forget that this is a borrowed culture, it’s not something we knew already. We got to know this through colonialism, let me put it that way. So the organisation of it, what we could use it for and all that, it was still beginning so yes we did what we could so what was readily available for us to do was to document who we were and that had to do with our values, our cultures and all that so yes we did that through newsreels and all that and it propagated governments efforts to build a new nation. We’re building institutions, we’re building schools, we’re building markets, and when I say markets lets not just see it as a little market somewhere, but we’re building markets, that means trying to get commodities that could serve a purpose so the encouragement for us to be able to make money out of our commodities for instance that could whet the appetite of the colonialists still, so Cocoa, we had interests in Cocoa, these are markets that we had to create so it was to rally people to make sure that we kept these things running. We had palm nuts and all that, these were commodities that the government itself had a hand in it. In fact Kwame Nkrumah actually established research centres for these. He had what they call CSIR Research Centres, one for Cocoa, one for Shea and Medicine and Pharmaceuticals so he was building these institutions and film played a very good role in telling the nation what was going on so that’s how we started, you know, how do you get this kind of information to people to know that government is actually working for them so the newsreels helped in doing that, to get people to get to understand what government was doing, the efforts that government was doing at the time.
[23:13:06-25:49:23]
A. A.: Would you say that early Ghanaian filmmaking was revolutionary?
J. A.: Yeah, you know African filmmaking, most of them started around independence time and it had to be revolutionary because you are in a position where somebody is subjugating you, somebody is discriminating against you, somebody is dehumanising you and then the stuff that they used to do that suddenly are in your hands so obviously you’re going to create a revolution because to be able to deal with the stars quo, to be able to change minds, you need to fight. It’s not a one day thing but it has to be an immediate thing and to be able to do that images are powerful so it has to be revolutionary so yes at the beginning it was revolutionary because it had to fight the politics of colonialism and that was not easy so we have to understand that neocolonialism was something that was lurking around because once they left power and given it back to what they call “natives” or the indigenes, you know, they still had to hold on to something so that’s why Kwame Nkrumah warned that yes we’ve had independence but that independence does not economic, it’s just political. Even with the politics, there is what we call the Neocolonialism which is that they still had to hold certain strings that they could pull, like a puppet, pull us as and when they wanted and he warned us against that so to fight this, it had to be a revolution because you had to be a force to be able to do that so let’s see it at that time, the African filmmakers had to see film as a way of a political or economic force to decolonize all the things that was happening to us.
[25:50:13-32:08:05]
What were the legacies of this era of filmmaking and do you think that it’s had an effect on the history of the country?
- 2 See : “Visions of Life Symposium: Utopian Dreams, Revolutionary Filmmaking and the Politics of the (...)
Oh yes! When it comes to the history of the country, yes because now, the archives are there. If you have to tell the history of a nation and you have a well collected archive, you can’t tell the history of a nation because films are loaded and they capture instances within periods of time so even if its just the way people dress, the way people speak or the way people say things, what they believe in and how that belief transcends who they are or what they believe in, it’s an adaptation of what the belief is, something that they’ve adopted or whatever it is, it’s all part of the cultural exhibition that a film would capture to show anybody so you can look at it and then tell the history of a people so yes that legacy that we have today, that the archives that existed from the 60s till today, if you take them, you can actually tell the history of Ghana because yes that’s what it captured but in terms of a legacy, yes we do have legacy because the archives are there.
Over the years, because of lack of funding on the part of government to maintain its archives in Ghana, I would say or because of the technicalities of maintaining negatives and all that, Ghana’s own films were lodged at the UK and these films have been there and there’s a history of its relevancy, history of its continuous stay in the UK and also a history of how we can maintain them or digitise them so that they become available or accessible so he’s it’s gone through a whole lot which I cannot say all of it here but the fact that we have our archives sitting in the UK, it’s something that we have to be serious about because we don’t know how long we can keep it there and as I said from the beginning, change of government can change a lot of things so it’s important that we did something about it now especially even if we could digitise it and understand that that process is in place to try to digitise it so that our filmmakers, our documentary filmmakers can have access to retell the stories that exist because a lot of stories have been told without having to have authentic references and I think that the archives will do a lot of good to prospective filmmakers to be able to tell authentic stories about who we are.
I’m so happy that you know last year, there was some effort by the Visions of Life group to kind of visit or revisit this archival issue and focused on Ghana, Ghana archives2 and I think that has been great and this year again the Visions of Life is revisiting the archives again, trying to see the state of it, not even just at the Bonded Services that we have lodged our films but even other places that would have Ghanaian films or films that were made about Ghanaians from the colonial period up till today if we could have access to it or if we could gain access to it or if there is a kind of a dialogue that could get them to even donate some to us. So that process is so interesting to me that we’re not just searching for what we have ourselves but what others have about us, that if we were able to get them together, yes we’ll have a collection, a very good collection of archive or archival material or celluloid material for Ghana that we can actually make comparisons, actually study and analyse it, critique what has gone by. So it’s good that individuals, Ghanaian individuals like Anita Afonu and Dan from Oxford are very much particular about archival material in Ghana and that through their work and then through their interest we’ll be able too retrieve lots of it to put in Ghana or to lodge in Ghana where not just privy to people who have the means to do that but even others in Ghana here to tell their stories. I think that’s very important.
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