Grandfather of African Film who made LOVE BREWED IN THE AFRICAN POT IN Nairobi

Ghanaian Kwaw Ansah urges use of film to reverse negative African image

Ghana’s great filmmaker Kwaw Ansah was back in Kenya an impassioned plea to the country's future filmmakers to tell their own stories and not try to imitate Hollywood. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU 

By MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

Posted  Friday, October 31  2014 at  13:07

Making an impassioned plea to Kenya’s future filmmakers to tell their own stories and not try to imitate Hollywood, Ghana’s great filmmaker Kwaw Ansah was back in the country this week after being away for almost 30 years.

The 73-year-old sage who’s often called ‘the Father of [Anglophone] African film’ had been invited by Kenyatta University’s chairman of its Theatre Arts and Film Technology Department, Dr John Mugubi to screen his most famous films and share insights with young KU students about the history of West African film.

But Ansah also told the students that film was an extremely powerful tool which they needed to use to reverse the negative images of Africa perpetuated by Hollywood films and Western culture generally.

Africa’s first award-winning filmmaker initially came in Kenya in 1986 to witness the phenomenal success of his film, Love Brewed in the African Pot.

“I was invited by Kenya’s Minister of Culture to come and show ‘Love Brewed’ here, but when I arrived, a man from the Kenya Film Board told me to go home because Kenyan audiences only like movies made in Hollywood,” Ansah recalled.

But the Ghanaian managed to convince the KFB man that he could at least show his movie on an experimental basis just to see if his assessment of Kenyans’ cinematic taste was accurate.

Ansah said Love Brewed opened the same weekend as the latest James Bond flick, but there was no comparison between the lengthy lines that came to see his film and the cinema seats left empty for Bond.

“There were full house crowds for three months,” said the man who not only scripted Love Brewed but also produced, directed and composed the sound track for the film.

Speaking last Wednesday at KU’s spacious Student Business Centre, Ansah insisted students first see his film before he spoke so they’d have some point of reference and something to talk about.

In fact, most of the youth that filled the KU auditorium hadn’t been born by the time Ansah’s film defied all the odds and proved to the international public that Africans could indeed make first-class films and tell their own stories at the same time.

Sharing some of the struggles he’d faced while helping establish Ghana’s fledgling film industry, Ansah described how he had been confronted with formidable odds, especially as he got no support from either the post-Nkrumah Ghanaian government or the private sector, including banks.

Ultimately, it was his father-in-law who volunteered to give him a house and title deed, so he could obtain a bank loan and proceed to make the film that he said cost more than $1 million (Sh89 million).  

Since then, he’s made two more feature films, ‘Heritage Africa’ and ‘Praise the Lord Plus One’ as well as several award-winning documentaries. He also founded his film production company, Film Africa Limited.