Ben

Their most creative collaboration, 2023’s “The Last Repair Shop,” led director Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers to a Best Documentary Short Oscar win the next year. But it wasn’t a given Bowers would compose the score for Proudfoot’s feature debut, “The Eyes of Ghana.”

“Because it’s a lot of work, right? It’s like, ‘OK, it’s six months of my life,’” Proudfoot told IndieWire during an interview at the 2025 Middleburg Film Festival. “When you decide, ‘OK, this project feels like it’s part of my body of work,’ it’s a big decision, one that I take seriously.”

Though he has mostly worked as a film and TV composer on projects like “Green Book,” “Bridgerton,” and Original Score nominee “The Wild Robot,” Bowers’ work with Proudfoot also includes the Oscar-nominated short “A Concerto Is a Conversation” as co-director. But joining him on this newer, longer, global venture has the composer excited “just be a part of what was already being created.”

“The Eyes of Ghana” is seen through the eyes of Chris Hesse, a Ghanaian filmmaker who documented the rise of President Kwame Nkrumah, known as the man who liberated the African continent. Furthermore, when colonizers attempted to burn all evidence of Nkrumah’s time as a revolutionary leader, Hesse snuck his reels out of Ghana, and into a London vault, where the footage has spent decades inside, waiting to be digitized.

As someone who grew up in Nova Scotia, Proudfoot was completely unaware of most of this history. While in Ghana during the COVID-19 pandemic, shooting a film for UNICEF, “the whole van of us, the crew, we’re driving down this main thoroughfare, and I saw this unusually shaped building and a statue of a man pointing. And I said, ‘What’s that?’ They said, ‘Oh, that’s the mausoleum for Kwame Nkrumah.’ And I said, ‘Who’s Kwame Nkrumah?’ Every Ghanaian in the vehicle turned around and looked at me like ‘What the hell?,” said the director. “We know Gandhi, we know Martin Luther King Jr., we know all these figures from history who are responsible for leading a movement that changed the course of a continent or hundreds of millions of people. But Kwame Nkrumah, I opened the file folder of my mind, and there’s nothing there.”

Naturally curious, Proudfoot inquired whether he could speak to anyone who knew the politician, and his crew excitedly pointed him toward Hesse, a now-nonagenarian who worked as Nkrumah’s personal cinematographer, shooting everything on 16mm and 35mm. Though they were 60 years and an ocean apart, Proudfoot and Hesse became fast friends united in the idea of getting the word out there to maintain this treasure trove of footage. “That’s my mission in life,” Hesse told the director.

Nkrumah was crucial in jumpstarting the Ghanaian film industry, building a studio to produce work that conveys an Africa that defies the expectations promoted by colonizers. “If I say, ‘Oh, here’s a documentary set in Africa,’ you immediately have certain expectations of what that might be, based on documentaries you’ve seen in the past or world hunger infomercials on the TV or whatever. Which is not a broad understanding of what’s going on, which was Kwame Nkrumah’s whole point in the first place,” said Proudfoot. 

Through the subject of his film, the director shows how an important part of Ghana’s modern history is entwined with a love of cinema. “We’re making a film not about Kwame Nkrumah, not about Ghana, we’re making a film about Chris Hesse and his experience and how he views it. And Chris Hesse is an extraordinary film artist, a cinematographer,” said Proudfoot. “So if you’re making a film about a filmmaker, you need to bring the best of everything to the table.” The director boasted how “huge swaths of the movie are shot in IMAX 70mm,” particularly in the film’s emotional conclusion, which was shot on 5-perf, 65mm celluloid on an IMAX camera. “That literal camera that we used, that came to Ghana, came from the set of ‘Sinners.’ Same camera.”

Like Proudfoot, Bowers had not heard of Nkrumah, nor had he been to Ghana. Bower said, “I’ve always just been really curious about any sort of scoring of an African project.” Upon formally accepting the offer to once again work with his friend Proudfoot, Bowers said, “I’m aware of the deep history and tradition with music, and so that was my first bit of excitement as a composer, trying to figure out how to incorporate some of that into the score.”

The gyil, the atenteben, and the talking drum were the three key instruments that helped him achieve a more African sound. “I would ask about the gyil, which is a mallet instrument, and was asking, ‘What key does that play in typically?’ So if I write, I can write in that key. And the musician I was speaking with was like, ‘Well, actually that’s usually tuned to whomever the singer is.’ And so that made me inspired to tune themes to each of the characters’ speaking voices and [spend] time transcribing the way they spoke, to see what key range did they speak in.” For instance, the charismatic Hesse was in the key of F Mixolydian. 

To play the atenteben, a bamboo flute, Bowers recruited Dela Botri based on impressive videos of the Ghanaian musician performing. “You could watch him playing jazz riffs and all this stuff. So we were like, ‘OK, we’ve got to get that guy,’” said the composer. Bowers was hesitant to use the talking drum after the instrument’s prominence in Ludwig Göransson’s Oscar-winning “Black Panther” score, but ultimately, “it’s such a huge part of Ghanaian history that it felt like I can’t not put that in there. And also, it felt weird that ‘Black Panther’ for some reason would make it so that I can’t use an instrument when I’m writing a score for an African film.”

Bowers did, however, come to a point where inspiration began getting in the way of execution. “My first pass of writing some of the cues, taking all this information, again, I spent a month studying this stuff, I tried writing a score from a Ghanaian perspective. And it was something that wasn’t quite fitting with the film,” said the composer. “The more Ben and I talked about it, the more I realized it was my own fear of not representing the country well, and music well in that way… This movie is about the power of and the love for cinema, and so [Ben] really encouraged me and helped me embrace just taking everything I know about film music, and I’ve learned now about Ghanaian music, and just try to make this as great as possible.”

He concluded, “I’m not Ghanaian. It actually would be more disrespectful for me to try to pretend like I could write this Ghanaian score. But more so, just try to take as much information as I can and be influenced and informed by that and write music from my heart at that point.”

Producer Moses Bwayo (and co-director of recent Best Documentary Feature nominee “Bobi Wine: The People’s President”) helped convince the prolific, Oscar-winning shorts director Proudfoot to make this his feature directorial debut.

“My philosophy is that it is our duty as filmmakers not to waste anybody’s time. And sometimes when you make a movie, the idea is that people want to escape. Certainly, I do. When I turn on a movie before I go to bed or on a Saturday afternoon or whatever, I want to go into a world for a few hours. I’m happy that it’s long,” he said. “But oftentimes with documentaries … you want to understand, you want to learn something, you want to solve the mystery, you want to meet these people, you want to come out enlightened, informed, inspired. And so if that’s the reason why you’re watching the movie — which is different, there’s a different kind of intention — you don’t want to spend more time than you need to. A lot of documentaries, especially over the last 10 years, have been designed to suck up as much of your time as possible. That’s why I’ve been so interested in short films, because it’s the opposite.”

He added, “With this film, even though it’s in the category of a feature-length documentary, it’s a lot packed into 89 minutes. As my career has gone on, what I’m committed to less so is format, of short form or feature film, and more just elegance and a richness. It couldn’t have been any shorter. And that the audience feels like, ‘Wow, I took in a lot, I went from knowing nothing about this to knowing a lot, caring a lot,’ that interests me.”

Ultimately, “The Eyes of Ghana” stealthily circles back to the kind of format Proudfoot is known for, making reference to producer and film subject Anita Afonu’s project “Perished Diamonds,” which covers the history of Ghanaian cinema in 40 minutes, plus all of Hesse’s work. “Those reels that are in the archive, they’re mainly short documentaries. So at the end, it might be a feature documentary, but it’s about an archive of short documentaries, so I can’t escape it,” said the director.

This resurfacing of Hesse’s footage is “the opposite of what’s happening in America and a lot of the world, which is history being erased, not being able to talk about a war on information. And this is an opening and a blooming of new history, which I think is very exciting,” said Proudfoot. “We’re very proud to be a part of that and drawing attention to that, not just in Ghana, but really across all Africa. Chris traveled all across the continent telling stories in all kinds of countries, because Kwame Nkrumah would lend out his film unit to all these other liberation movements. So it’s continent-wide, really.”

“The Eyes of Ghana” is the first independent feature produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, and has yet to find a distributor, but Proudfoot’s urgency lies more with encouraging the digitization of Hesse’s archive than rushing into a deal to release the film in theaters. “It’s just about remembering why we made this movie and continuing to pound the pavement and find people who get it, who understand it, and who believe this is an important story that must be told,” he said. “These kinds of stories, often African narratives, they just get left off. ‘It’s not relevant, it’s not important.’ It is important.”

Proudfoot added, “Part of what we’re doing with the film is helping Chris in his mission to reframe this archive, not as a nice-to-have, but as an essential piece of history.”

To Proudfoot, “The highest and best use of documentary is to get people to pay attention, and let’s face it, do something about it. Not just say, ‘That’s a nice documentary.’ [claps] ‘Here’s an award,’ or ‘We think you’re great.’ So what? This archive, if we don’t pay attention, it’s going to be gone in 15 years,” he said. “That’s what happens to cinema, that’s what happens to celluloid. So that’s our hope, whether it’s the distributor or whether it’s finding somebody who really cares about this, who has a connection to it, it must make a difference in the world. Entertainment, for me, it’s not enough. I think it must help solve that problem.”

“The Eyes of Ghana” world-premiered at TIFF before playing Middleburg. It is currently seeking a U.S. distributor.