TIFF 2025: 'The Eyes of Ghana' Captures Kwame Nkrumah's Belief in Cinema as a Tool for African Liberation

Over 50 years since his death and nearly 60 years after his overthrow, Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for Africa, not just Ghana, plays a large role in the Barack and Michelle Obama-produced documentary The Eyes of Ghana by director Ben Proudfoot. The film, which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival as the opening documentary, has received enthusiastic reviews. 

While studying in the United States at Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania, Nkrumah saw the role cinema played in American life and culture. That realization played a crucial role in how he governed Ghana and interacted with other African leaders, who, at the time, were seeking to gain independence for their own countries, just as Ghana had. That is why he established the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC), and he shared his philosophy and mission with Rev. Chris Hesse, the cinematographer and filmmaker who documented his life and travels as president. And who is the protagonist in The Eyes of Ghana.

Proudfoot and his team found that Hesse, who is now 93, is the keeper of Nkrumah’s belief that cinema was a key component to shaping African liberation.

Unlike other documentaries, Hesse doesn’t just speak to the camera. Instead, we learn of the message and mission organically through his grandfatherly relationship with fellow filmmaker Anita Afonu, who is also one of the documentary’s producers.

Afonu’s 2013 40-minute short film Perished Diamonds, featuring Hesse and Edmund Addo, who worked as a projectionist for the outdoor Rex Theatre in Accra, helped Proudfoot and fellow producer Nana Adwoa Frimpong find a foundation for The Eyes of Ghana. “Ben [Proudfoot] would say he couldn’t have made this film without Anita [Afonu],” Frimpong tells OkayAfrica.

Working with former U.S. President Barack Obama and Higher Ground Productions was also organic, says Frimpong. “I remember we had a meeting about it and was like, ‘Well, who is sort of this access point [for the film], and it was Barack Obama, like the African and the American. And there is also the fact that Kwame Nkrumah was inspired by African American civil rights leaders. So it was like it goes both ways, and we had worked with Higher Ground on another film, and they had been great partners there, and so, when we brought this to them, they were like, ‘Yeah, we see a connection here.’”

As the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants to Canada, Frimpong is also very personally connected to the documentary. “This film has really felt like an invitation for me to really get curious about where I come from,” says Frimpong, who grew up as one of a handful of Black students in her schools until she went to college in Toronto. 

“Meeting Chris Hesse, meeting Anita [Afonu], hearing their stories, I was like, ‘Oh, wow. Here are people who know why this is so important, because they're literally showing us the thing that I so desperately needed and didn't even know … When I see the people on screen dancing, and they're joyful, and they look like my parents, I'm like, ‘Okay, that's the thing that I have been searching for. That's the range of possibilities that I've been hoping to see.”

Frimpong, who attended the University of Southern California Film School in Los Angeles, tells OkayAfrica: “I had a very limited scope of what it meant to tell a story about a Black person, about an African person, and I think it's also because the world unfortunately expects a limited characterization of us.”

That realization is perhaps what makes what Hesse shares about Nkrumah’s vision all the more powerful. Unlike Frimpong, Afonu did learn of Hesse in film school but had no idea what a great treasure he truly was. “They talk about him, but they don't teach about him,” she tells OkayAfrica. “But there was never any instance where he was invited to talk to us or anything like that.”

Needing to piece together her own sense of Ghanaian film history in many ways led her to Hesse. But where Perished Diamonds focuses on the Ghanaian film industry as a whole, The Eyes of Ghana zones more into Hesse and Nkrumah. What viewers learn is how central Nkrumah viewed cinema’s role in African liberation, in the fight against colonialism. 

“There was a sense of urgency in the way he wanted this to happen: ‘Let’s have a viable film industry. Let's reverse the image that the colonizers showed. Let's build our own film industry and show us in a much better light,” she paraphrases. “We all learn about Nkrumah in history class, but it's only like a surface scratch, something you have to just pass to get to the next level. And I feel like this film is quite a history lesson, even for Ghanaians.”

Hesse’s films of Nkrumah, previously believed to be destroyed, are vital to the documentary. He captures him addressing the United Nations, meeting with American president John F. Kennedy, as well as some of his many secret meetings with other African leaders. But the filmmaker-turned-reverend is very clear that what he captured was very intentional on Nkrumah’s part. In many ways, he knew that this footage would remain important long after his death. And it’s why the Rex, protected by Addo, also plays an important role in the documentary.

For Afonu, the film is coming at a great time. “I would say in the last five to eight years, there has been a resurgence of Kwame Nkrumah, especially in Ghana and especially with the millennial generation,” she says. “And so with this resurgence and with this film, I feel like everything is coming together so beautifully, and we're getting to know more about Nkrumah.”

That doesn’t mean Afonu views Nkrumah as a god. “At the end of the day, he was a human being like everybody else. He had his flaws, but he had a vision, not just for Ghana, but for the entire continent — and this film is about the entire continent. It’s about how he brought all of us together. He inspired over 250 million Africans, which includes the father of the first Black president of the United States. And it shows just how Nkrumah connects all of us, and it's so beautiful.”

Although Hesse could not make the trip to the TIFF for The Eyes of Ghana’s world premiere, his excitement over the rediscovery of not just his work but Nkrumah’s vision is felt all over the film. Hesse’s joy as a person is just infectious. His recognition as an important conduit of history through filmmaking matters greatly to Afonu.

“I am incredibly grateful that this film has been made while he's still with us. It would have been a real shame for this film to be a posthumous kind of thing,” she says. “God forbid if he even left tomorrow, I am at peace knowing that he got to see a cut and he was happy with it.”