Renowned Ghanaian movie actress, Nana Ama McBrown
A renowned Ghanaian movie actress, Nana Ama McBrown, has said the movie industry in Ghana is not progressing due to a lack of structures and a proper regulatory body to govern the industry.
Speaking to Nana Aba Anamoah on Starr Chat on Wednesday, McBrown said, unlike their Nigerian counterparts who are well-structured with the government interventions, the situation in Ghana is different.
According to her, the movie players in Ghana have been left unchecked, thereby creating a state of mushroom movie producers in the industry.
“Since I started, it has been an independent job, independent producers and even when we had a board and all that, I will say that it wasn’t too active. If it were active, many movies wouldn’t have come out within that time, and the reason is that the structures from the top are not there.
“Right now in Ghana, anybody can pick a camera and call the shots and say I’m the producer. However, YouTube is the ultimate sales point now, and everybody would put it there. We have other alternatives like Netflix and all that because we started to tell our stories the wrong way,” she disclosed.
McBrown stated that with a good administrative structure in place, the Ghanaian stories could be presented well in the movies to attract International Market.
“It was a profit-based thing for everybody. We were not thinking about how we are selling Ghana; rather, we were thinking about enriching our pockets, especially the producers. People like us were learning on the field, so from the beginning, it was a learning process. Until we got to a stage we realized that this is how we are going to tell the story differently,” she narrated.
The actress reiterated that the Ghanaian movie industry is still lost because the independent producers are still at the helm of affairs.
“It is very expensive, so once in a while, you will see a good movie,” Mcbrown added.