'The Eyes Of Ghana' Review

The feature debut of two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot continues to show his passion for the passionate and furthers his collaboration with composer Kris Bowers.

Ben Proudfoot has made a name for himself as a director of documentary shorts, winning Academy Awards for his films The Queen of Basketball and The Last Repair Shop (co-directed with Kris Bowers), and earlier earning a nomination for A Concerto is a Conversation (also with Bowers). All of this within the last five years. One of his multiple films from last year, The Turnaround (co-directed with Kyle Thrash), was the only short to make my list of the best documentaries of 2024. It was only a matter of time before he’d make the leap to features, and his debut in that category, The Eyes of Ghana, is, fortunately, exactly what you should expect it to be: another joyous film showing his love for people and their passions.

With The Last Repair Shop, Proudfoot and Bowers gave us a love letter to music education. His and Thrash’s The Turnaround is a love letter to sports fandom. Now he has made a love letter to the power of cinema. If you’re not familiar with Proudfoot’s work, your expectations for The Eyes of Ghana may differ. It’s not a deep examination of post-colonial Ghana, nor a history lesson about its first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah. It’s not even the complete story of the discovery of a treasure trove of surviving films that had been thought destroyed after Nkrumah’s government was overthrown by the military. All of those things are part of the documentary, but as firstly a portrait of 93-year-old Ghanaian filmmaker Chris Hesse, it’s a lighter affair than, say, Concerning Violence or even Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

Hesse was the personal cinematographer for Nkrumah, who believed in the importance of film as a tool for independence. The medium could be used by Africans to represent themselves more truthfully and tell their own stories outside the Western gaze and colonial motives. Hesse provided the Ghanaian leader with a dynamic platform for his campaign to unite Africa. He accompanied Nkrumah around their new nation as it gained independence from Britain, overseas to the United Nations, and to Harlem for a celebration of his continent’s American descendants. He captured footage of meetings with John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, and Queen Elizabeth, with whom Nkrumah is seen dancing. He filmed speeches made to other African leaders. In many cases, particularly on foreign trips, Hesse was the only Black cameraman present. Later, he documented the coup that changed everything.

Now he instructs a new generation of filmmakers in Ghana, ensuring the country’s cinematic legacy continues. While most of the documentary focuses on close-ups of Hesse as he tells his story and charms the audience, one of his mentees, Anita Afonu, is also a supporting subject representing that future of Ghanaian cinema (watch her own short documentary on the history of film in Ghana, Perished Diamonds, here). Another character in the film is “Mr. Addo,” a projectionist at an old outdoor theater that we see restored for an event premiering Hesse’s reclaimed films. Addo and his movie house are additional relics employed to recall the heyday of Ghanaian cinema. He’s also another one of Proudfoot’s passionate; his love of film exhibition is heartfelt.

Where The Eyes of Ghana might have been stronger, albeit while becoming a different documentary altogether in the process, pertains to some of the questions raised directly or indirectly through its narrative. “What was so dangerous about those films that they had to be destroyed?” Afonu asks. Other than them portraying a politician no longer favored and wished to be wiped away, the answer isn’t explicitly given. Also, for a prime minister whose power is recognized to have been abused, how can we be sure Hesse’s films weren’t as much propaganda as record? This documentary and Hesse both maintain a respectable vagueness on certain matters. In a classroom scene, one of his students requests a more concrete statement on whether his work shows proof that Nkrumah was a “good” person. Hesse says it does not because it’s for the viewer to watch and judge if Nkrumah was “right” or “wrong,” “angel” or “satan.” He also affirms that he was always objective in his filming and editing.

Proudfoot’s short documentaries deal in feelings more than information, and The Eyes of Ghana is no different, just longer. The emotional effect is again aided by a sweeping and sentimental score by Bowers (best known now for his Oscar-nominated music for The Wild Robot). It plays at full volume and for full impact over montages of film strips feeding through projectors, volunteers working on the refurbishment of Mr. Addo’s theater, faces of audience members in attendance watching Hesse’s recovered old films, and extended shots of Hesse in tears viewing his own work for the first time in over half a century, in its new preserved digital form. What this documentary lacks in weight and substance, it makes up for in warmth and fervor, ultimately entertaining with positivity and grace.

Plenty of documentaries sell serious illuminations, but too few leave us smiling so brightly, infected with the contagious euphoria of their spirited subjects. We need more nonfiction works, no matter their length, like The Last Repair Shop and The Eyes of Ghana, that move and excite us by sharing others who’ve been moved and excited. Does this one occasionally feel like an extended short or compilation of multiple short-film-worthy morsels (Mr. Addo’s part definitely could have been spun off into a brief piece of its own and been just as potent)? I’ve long claimed the distinction between documentary shorts and features is that the former should be more of a profile spotlighting a person or thing, and the latter follows their story, and The Eyes of Ghana seems to fall more into that first definition. Still, it doesn’t dismiss the fact that, as a whole, it’s a poignantly satisfying evolution of Proudfoot’s interests and aesthetic.

This review of The Eyes of Ghana was written during the film’s debut at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.