While having a late night dinner at Kempinski Hotel with a few friends in Accra yesterday, Fred Nuamah, the founder of Ghana Movie Awards walked in on me and soon after the usual pleasantries, the conversation fell on the recent Gabby Okyere Darko’s largely branded besmirching of the Ghanaian Movie Industry comment.
I’ve tried to stay away from commenting on this matter but the issue has become almost ubiquitous such that it managed to snail itself into unrelated late night dinner conversation with friends—as Fred briefly stopped by to ask what’s my honest take on what Gabby said and the subsequent rabid industry responses.
The Ghanaian Movie Industry is a fascinating one—perhaps it’s the only self-destructive community of ignorant and quasi-talented and educated bunch that I can point out in recent times, that almost wholly blames its puerile and laughable state on external actors, mainly the government of the day.
The argument has been and remains that, a certain government has not done anything or much to erect the needed systems and structures, capable of catapulting the industry to commendable standard—sometimes put as there is no government support.
Reasonably, the above suggests that should a government throw enough support behind the industry, it would suddenly ejaculate out of its deplorable state to become something great, probably an infant Hollywood.
But that’s not true: even if a government absurdly pumps billions of dollars into supporting, enacting legislation and erecting structures for the so called-Ghanaian Movie Industry where Moesha, Fella Makafui, Prince David Osei, Yvonne Nelson and others are the best, it wouldn’t make any difference. It will be a fruitless venture, in fact pretty stupid, and that is why no government is ready to do it.
What’s the actual value of the industry actors, such that anyone should consciously invest and take a risk with them? Have the actors invested in themselves? How do they place themselves?
I am not confident that there are even two actors in Ghana who when graciously uprooted and planted in Hollywood, a well-structured industry would survive or be able to make any worthy name.
What we call an industry regrettably is full of slayers and cotton-wool brains. People who claim to be actors but are lousy at acting, and have also failed to improve themselves over the years are those angry and leading the conversation.
Which actors or actresses, including those who have been here for over a decade, have sought any improvement of their craft—have prepared themselves and worked on their skills and are capable of being a Hollywood or a proper-Industry material?
Garbage is garbage, irrespective of where it’s placed.
It’s not just our productions that are sub-standard. The shown runners and their crew are jokers and grossly incompetent.
This is an industry where one of the so-called top actresses, did not know what a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) actually means, a film-maker told me this morning in a telephone conversation.
It’s painful to see delusion being paraded as confidence or ambition—and this is the web that glues together our wobbly Movie industry.
Gabby Okyere Darko is talkative and it’s highly probably he has not watched any 10 movies as he claims—but his assertion that there is something inherent or fundamentally wrong with the Ghanaian Movie Industry is undeniable. And the government is not the major solution, rather, the industry players who are somewhat more interested in slaying than improving themselves.
Almost every young woman or man in Ghana is an actor—that’s how cheap it has become. Moesha and now Fella Makafui probably get more movie roles, even if cameos, than everyone else—that’s not a government-to-solve problem.
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