It hurts to accept that the Ghana Movie Industry does NOT look as promising as it used to be some few years back. With immense passion and a vibrant future, industry players were once excited and ready to toil to get the Ghana Movie Industry to a certain recognizable standard. Today, we are left with a Kumasi Movie Industry—which is just striving on tickling comedy and mediocre… The Ghana Movie Industry finally fell off the cliff somewhere last year when the major production houses couldn’t measure cost against profit—I think. There was a time we could boast of 15 competitive movies by several production houses starring some of the major names in the industry per year. Amidst this tight competition, Socrate Sarfo will also push through his controversial movies. It was headache, but at least we had something we could call a Movie Industry. With major production houses shutting down and the few smart ones switching to TV productions to avoid being dragged into the Movie Industry’s recession, many of our on-screen celebrities have become jobless. Even those who are lucky do not score as much roles as they used to have when the industry was riding on strong legs, motivated by ‘things will get better so let’s keep trying’. I hate to call it a DejaVu because the physics of such occurrence is dicey. But it seems we are back to the ‘Ghost Tears’ days when we thought we had an industry—only to wake up one day with nothing… We seem to be great at hyping things, creating false impressions and living the red carpet life on delusion. We have so many boastful movie stars and yet no movie out there… In order to stay in the limelight and not necessarily to help the dying Movie Industry, most of our actors and actresses have decided to find a quick fix to their jobless situation by simply hiring themselves. Without any skill or much of any experience, they’ve transformed themselves from struggling actors who cannot even get the basic acting right to become Directors and Producers—directing themselves and others. And we expect to come out of the recession with this? The main movie Producers/Directors in Ghana are not the Abdul Sallams, the Shirley Frimpong Mansos and the Socrate Sarfos anymore…They are the Yvonne Nelsons, Yvonne Okoros, Juliet Ibrahims, Van Vickers and the others… How can a blind man be so confident to lead a class of blind people? Perhaps, just to satisfy his Ego and maintain a deluded status—and not to genuinely help the class. I do not have any problem with people taking up challenges in life….But I have serious problems with not finishing with one and jumping to a bigger one—especially when you do so for selfish reasons. We so much want the Government of Ghana to step in and help the Movie Industry…But with ‘slackers’ in control, who will be senseless enough to invest in such a delusion? Now that our movie stars who could not sweep us off our feet with their acting have forcefully graduated to become Directors and Producers, I know they will soon become their own consumers as movie lovers will get tired of the substandard productions. Our dying Movie Industry needs a robust restorative plan and not uncoordinated punches from all angles, fused with unnecessary complacency. Until we begin to acknowledge the benefits of training and re-training, we will continue to struggle and delude ourselves—just to hold a non-existing status. It is time consumers stop playing part in the collapse of the Industry by failing to patronize the various sub-standard movies, and getting rid of the needless hailing of mediocre… Until then, let’s watch our bragging right go out of the window…
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