Elvis Damptey is an award-winning filmmaker and producer, and the founder of Anansesɛm. He writes about the business, craft, and culture of African cinema.
Newsroom Sparrow Studios and OldFilm Productions unveiled the collaboration on September 8 at the Labadi Beach Hotel in Accra: three films under one title, The 70 Slate: A Cinematic Celebration of Ghana at 70, arriving between December 2026 and December 2027 under the joint direction of filmmakers Shirley Frimpong-Manso and Peter Sedufia. The first, The Return […]
Newsroom Bare Feet opens with a dare printed right on its own poster: when all you have are your bare feet, you use them. That is also the shape of the film itself, a coming-of-age story about two Ghanaian boys chasing a future in football with nothing else to work with. Now, that premise has real […]
Industry A new documentary asks what African women do with their natural hair. The bigger story is how an independent film like it actually gets made, financed, and carried to an audience without a studio behind it. Crown or Class opens on a simple premise: two young African women, one in Ghana, one in Belgium, and […]
Industry Ghana’s Been Here Before, Just Not Like This. Later this month, a Ghanaian film will step onto one of the biggest stages in the world. Zjili: A Story of Sisterhood and the Burdens of Excess has its world premiere in the Discovery programme at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of ten African productions and […]
Industry A producer in Accra finishes a feature. The shoot is done, the edit is locked, the festival premiere or the launch party has come and gone. Then the actual test begins. Can the film get a real run in a cinema, or a slot on television, or a seat on a streaming platform, or does […]
Spotlight When Ego Reach We All, internationally titled Our Time Will Come, arrived at the 79th Locarno Film Festival this August, most of the attention went where it usually goes: to the director. Amartei Armar’s debut feature had entered Concorso Cineasti del Presente after his short TsutsuƐ became the first film from Sub-Saharan Africa selected for […]
Spotlight At the 79th Locarno Film Festival this August, Amartei Armar’s debut feature left with two prizes, not one. Ego Reach We All, known internationally as Our Time Will Come, won the Pardo for Change, a CHF 20,000 director’s award. And within Concorso Cineasti del Presente, the festival’s competition for first and second features, the jury […]
Newsroom In 2022, a short film called TsutsuƐ became the first film from Ghana, and from Sub-Saharan Africa, to compete in the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Short Film competition. It made the final nine out of more than 3,500 submissions. This year, the same director, Amartei Armar, brings his debut feature to the Locarno Film Festival, […]
Industry The National Film Authority just launched a GH₵20 million fund. That is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. For decades, Ghana’s film industry has survived through creativity, resilience, and individual effort. But industries are rarely built by talent alone. They are built through systems, and Ghana is now, visibly, trying to […]
Industry Twice, Ghana built something that worked. Twice, it lost the ground under that success before building whatever was supposed to come next. This is that pattern, and the question of whether it’s about to repeat itself again. “What happened to Ghana’s film industry?” usually gets asked like an accusation, one where the answer is assumed […]
