The Eyes of Ghana
**Seen at the 2026 Atlanta Film Festival.
It wasn’t the most important part of “The Eyes of Ghana’s” narrative, but seeing the renovation of the Rex Cinema for the final premiere of the footage was inspiring to me. In a way, however, it is important context for the film that Ben Proudfoot has made, however, which looks to reclaim the film legacy of Ghana through the work of documentarian Chris Hesse.
In the first part of the film, we learn that Hesse- who is 93 years old- has his eyesight failing. For years, his eye was focused on the Ghanan political leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who was American educated, and hoped to unify the African continent as The United States of Africa after decades of colonial rule. Much of the footage he captured was thought lost, but it was actually located in a processing lab vault in negative form in London.
Proudfoot’s film is fairly straightforward, and- after the initial few minutes dedicated to Hesse’s struggles late in life- focuses in on the political moment his camera captured. Though not the same type of film, I was reminded of the 2024 documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” which was also about an African political leader who- in the ’50s-’60s- wanted to free African countries from colonial rule, and was assassinated for it. Nkrumah’s legacy was that of authoritarian rule, as well as a coup d’etat against him, but Hesse’s footage wanted to go against the colonial narrative. Through Hesse’s lens, he was a revolutionary who wanted to reshape a continent. Even in documentaries, objectivity is at a premium, and Hesse’s camera is one of propagandist intent, even if it is running counter to the western world’s own propaganda. We only see about 15 minutes of Hesse’s footage, but what we do see is alive and fascinating. “The Eyes of Ghana” struggles to find focus, though, between being a safe documentary about a (largely) unknown filmmaking giant, a film about Ghana’s brief cinematic legacy, and the politics that brought Hesse to the forefront of the latter. I almost wish the film had focused on Hesse, and the country’s film industry; as it is, it feels like it’s only scratching the surface of everything.
