We’ve been fans of Ben Proudfoot’s work since we screened his exceptional short film The Ox at the Greenville Drive-in almost ten years ago. As expected from the promise of his early work, Ben has blossomed into a fully-realized master documentarian, complete with two Oscars. 

    Back in November, we were lucky enough to catch his latest feature-length doc, The Eyes of Ghana, as one of the selections for the 2025 Hawai’i International Film Festival, screened here in Hilo at the wonderful historic silent-era movie house, The Palace. Given the subject matter, it is hard to imagine a more perfect venue for the film. 

      The Eyes of Ghana was everything we’ve come to expect from Ben’s work – a humanist story of artistic perseverance, exquisitely photographed (apparently in IMAX) and married to an elegant musical score. The story follows the life of 93-year-old Ghanese filmmaker, Chris Hesse, who had notably served in the 1950s-60s as the personal documentarian to Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. I truly hate to admit my ignorance here, but like most Americans, I had no idea who Kwame Nkrumah was, nor the significance of his rise to power in Africa, liberating Ghana from British rule in 1957. It is testament, I suppose, to how thoroughly Nkrumah was scrubbed from our history books once he pivoted Ghana away from the West and aligned it with the major Communist states of the East. He was ultimately deposed in a coup in in 1966 and the new regime made best attempts to destroy his legacy, including ordering the destruction of Ghana’s film archives. 

       Many of Hesse’s films master, however, remained untouched for decades in a storage locker in London, where they had been originally processed. In the final chapter of his extraordinary life, Hesse was now enlisting the help of younger Ghanese filmmakers to help preserve the material, come to terms with the significance of the events he had recorded and, by extension, bolster the return of Ghanese filmmaking in the present. Hesse is a compelling and humorous subject, bringing a vitality that seems unaffected by his age. 

      For anyone who is even remotely interested in film preservation and the history of cinema, Eyes of Ghana is a beautiful, thoughtful film. At the moment, it is making the rounds of the festival circuit, but one presumes it will be available on one or more streaming services in the not-too-distant future.