{"id":43761,"date":"2025-08-04T17:59:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T17:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/43761\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T17:59:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T17:59:08","slug":"ben-proudfoot-moses-bwayo-team-with-obamas-for-the-eyes-of-ghana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/43761\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Proudfoot & Moses Bwayo Team With Obamas For ‘The Eyes Of Ghana’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEXCLUSIVE: Two-time Oscar winning filmmaker has teamed with Moses Bwayo and Barack and Michelle Obama<\/a> for\u00a0The Eyes of Ghana<\/a>, a new documentary feature that spotlights Chris Hesse, the 93-year-old forgotten personal cinematographer of revolutionary African leader Kwame Nkrumah.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film, which has already wrapped and is in the final stages of post-production, marks Proudfoot\u2019s first feature-length documentary in a decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Eyes of Ghana\u00a0details the rise and fall of Nkrumah, a towering figure of African history who inspired the liberation of the continent in the 1950s and 1960s after rising to serve as Ghana\u2019s first President. A political theorist and prominent African leader, Nkrumah was even featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1953.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHe was later toppled by a military coup in 1966, which was allegedly backed by the CIA, after he was cast as a dictator. As a result, the films made during Nkrumah\u2019s time were ordered to be burned. Though his name is all but erased in the U.S., Nkrumah remains an iconic and revered figure across much of Africa.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHesse serves as the film\u2019s unsung cinematic hero, along with his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, filmmaker and producer Anita Afonu. The documentary unveils a huge archive of surviving celluloid films from Africa\u2019s liberation era in the 20th\u00a0century, which were long thought to be destroyed but had been quietly safeguarded by Hesse for more than 60 years. For the first time, this hidden trove is unearthed to tell the untold origin story of the African continent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tChris Hesse in \u2018The Eyes of Ghana\u2019<\/p>\n

\n\tCanadian filmmaker Proudfoot first met Hesse when the latter was 90-years-old after Ghanaian journalist Justice Baidoo (who is a co-producer on\u00a0The Eyes of Ghana) introduced the two filmmakers while Proudfoot was in Ghana shooting a film for UNICEF. Hesse told Proudfoot about his secret archive of more than 1,000 films and asked Proudfoot for his help to digitize them. Originally imagining a short documentary about Hesse, Proudfoot consulted his friend Bwayo, the Ugandan filmmaker behind\u00a0Bobi Wine: The People\u2019s President, who convinced him to turn the film into a feature.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSimilarly to Hesse, Bwayo had experience as a personal cameraman to a revolutionary political leader and, after surviving gunshots to his face and attempts on his life while making\u00a0Bobi Wine, he has since taken political asylum in the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tProudfoot is renowned for celebrating little-known heroes of history and has won two Best Documentary Short Film Oscars for his films\u00a0The Last Repair Shop\u00a0and\u00a0The Queen of Basketball. His short film\u00a0A Concerto is a Conversation\u00a0was nominated for an Academy Award in in 2021. He recently teamed up with the Obamas for short doc\u00a0The Turnaround, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Eyes of Ghana\u00a0is produced by Breakwater Studios\u2019 Proudfoot and Nana Adwoa Frimpong, Afonu, Bwayo and Brandon Somerhalder alongside Higher Ground\u2019s Ethan Lewis and Vinnie Malhotra. Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers on the project.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tComposer Kris Bowers, who was recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Wild Robot, has written an original score for\u00a0The Eyes of Ghana.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: Two-time Oscar winning filmmaker has teamed with Moses Bwayo and Barack and Michelle Obama for\u00a0The Eyes of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[25041,25042,96,2839,25043,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-43761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-barack-and-michelle-obama","tag-ben-proudfoot","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-the-eyes-of-ghana","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}