EXCLUSIVE: Two-time Oscar winning filmmaker has teamed with Moses Bwayo and Barack and Michelle Obama for The Eyes of Ghana, a new documentary feature that spotlights Chris Hesse, the 93-year-old forgotten personal cinematographer of revolutionary African leader Kwame Nkrumah.
The film, which has already wrapped and is in the final stages of post-production, marks Proudfoot’s first feature-length documentary in a decade.
The Eyes of Ghana 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 as a dictator. As a result, the films made during Nkrumah’s time were ordered to be burned. Though his name is all but erased in the U.S., Nkrumah remains an iconic and revered figure across much of Africa.
Hesse serves as the film’s unsung cinematic hero, along with his protégé, filmmaker and producer Anita Afonu. The documentary unveils a huge archive of surviving celluloid films from Africa’s liberation era in the 20th century, which were long thought to be destroyed but had been quietly safeguarded by Hesse for more than 60 years. For the first time, this hidden trove is unearthed to tell the untold origin story of the African continent.
Chris Hesse in ‘The Eyes of Ghana’
Canadian filmmaker Proudfoot first met Hesse when the latter was 90-years-old after Ghanian journalist Justice Baidoo (who is a co-producer on The Eyes of Ghana) introduced the two filmmakers while Proudfoot was in Ghana shooting a film for UNICEF. Hesse told Proudfoot about his secret archive of more than 1,000 films and asked Proudfoot for his help to digitize them. Originally imagining a short documentary about Hesse, Proudfoot consulted his friend Bwayo, the Ugandan filmmaker behind Bobi Wine: The People’s President, who convinced him to turn the film into a feature.
Similarly to Hesse, Bwayo had experience as a personal cameraman to a revolutionary political leader and, after surviving gunshots to his face and attempts on his life while making Bobi Wine, he has since taken political asylum in the U.S.
Proudfoot is renowned for celebrating little-known heroes of history and has won two Best Documentary Short Film Oscars for his films The Last Repair Shop and The Queen of Basketball. His short film A Concerto is a Conversation was nominated for an Academy Award in in 2021. He recently teamed up with the Obamas for short doc The Turnaround, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last year.
The Eyes of Ghana is produced by Breakwater Studios’ Proudfoot and Nana Adwoa Frimpong, Afonu, Bwayo and Brandon Somerhalder alongside Higher Ground’s Ethan Lewis and Vinnie Malhotra. Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers on the project.
Composer Kris Bowers, who was recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Wild Robot, has written an original score for The Eyes of Ghana.
