Ms Afua Kissi-Nyame, head of marketing at Multichoice Ghana has tasked filmmakers in Ghana to introduce new talents into their movies. According to her, the company receives a lot of feedback from customers, and it is always about them seeing the same old faces in movies.
She was a panel member at the third edition of the Graphic Showbiz Forum held in Accra. She made these revelations when she was speaking on the topic “challenges of marketing Ghanaian movies.”
“When it comes to marketing Ghanaian films, I think it’s about the acts we use. We get feedback from people saying we are always seeing the same faces. Why don’t you change the actors and why are you showing this programme and it is the same cast on the next show?
“There’s always that feedback from our customers when it comes to Ghanaian film productions and from our side, it is very challenging since the customers are expecting that we bring them fresh content and fresh faces,” she noted.
In recent times, the Ghana Movie Industry has seen a decline. Others are of the view that the film industry has even collapsed. It is in light of this development among others that the program ‘Graphic Showbiz Forum’ is organized to address some of the concerns.
Ms Kissi-Nyame also hammered on a major challenge that has bedeviled the movie industry in Ghana. This has to do with the lack of support among industry players she noted. Filmmakers in Ghana prefer to work independently rather than to collaborate on projects. This has definitely contributed to the near collapse of the movie industry.
Ms Kissi-Nyame mentioned; “We find that even though we get very good content coming through, we don’t get support from people from the industry promoting it. The players themselves are not pushing hard for their own content. There seems to be lots of competition rather so when there’s a new movie, you will expect that everybody will jump and push it because word of mouth is very strong. For example, ‘Have you seen Prince’s movie?’ but that doesn’t happen.
“And mostly for the actors, it is more about the paycheck so they are kind of removed from what they are part of. If collectively we can decide to push our content, it will grow at a speed that will surprise everybody.”
The Ghana Movie Industry has seen a lot of success in the early 2000’s that led to a lot memorable projects like, ‘Somewhere in African’, Pool Party 1&2′, ‘Things we do for love’ etc. However, those successes only serve as refreshing memories to us.
Others have also linked the poor performance of the movie industry to lack of Government support. The government has not made conscious efforts to support filmmaking in Ghana. Unlike the days of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, where people were funded to go learn the act of filmmaking abroad.
