Obama-backed doc film focused on Ghana produced by woman with B.C. roots
Published 12:36 pm Friday, October 30, 2026
Surrey-raised filmmaker Nana Adwoa Frimpong produced The Eyes of Ghana, an acclaimed documentary executive-produced by U.S. presidential couple Barack and Michelle Obama, Higher Ground founders.
The 90-minute feature doc explores the life and work of 93-year-old Ghanaian filmmaker Chris Hesse, whose archive chronicles Ghana’s early years as a sovereign nation.
Hesse served as personal cameraman to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president. As his eyesight faded, Hesse rescued more than 1,000 films capturing the West Africa country’s fight for independence in the 1950s and 60s.
The film, world-premiered a year ago at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), is now in theatres across North America including Surrey’s Landmark Guildford on Sunday, Nov. 1.
Frimpong, a director, writer and creative producer, says she’s thrilled to have the movie shown in her hometown.
“My parents still live there (in Surrey) and they’re inviting everybody they know,” Frimpong said on the phone from New York City. “It’s exciting. I never dreamed that my home theatre would play a film that I produced. It’s very cool.”
A Surrey resident until age 18, Frimpong now lives in Los Angeles and works for Breakwater Studios to “illuminate stories of women and people of colour,” the company website notes.
Frimpong’s parents grew up in Ghana and later found a home in Canada with their children.
“For me to be making a film like this, my first big film, and to have it call back to where my parents are from, where my sisters and I grew up knowing and believing was an extension of our home (in Canada), it’s a dream come true.”
Frimpong’s passion for storytelling, the Breakwater website says, is marked by her past community organizing work around accessibility rights for students.
Her advocacy “led to the implementation of the first genderless bathrooms in the University of Toronto Scarborough’s 58-year-old history, the publication of the first online print journal, MAYA, to honour women storytellers on campus, headlining a woman’s storytelling conference with Founder and Executive Director of the Me Too Movement, Tarana Burke, and hosting the annual 2017 TEDxUTSC conference as the first woman to do so.”
A trailer for The Eyes of Ghana, directed by Oscar-winning Nova Scotian Ben Proudfoot (Breakwater Studios), is posted on Youtube.