Ghanaian filmmaker Redeemer A. Mensah known for productions including “Run Baby Run”, “Home Sweet Home”, “Once upon a time in Ghana” and the yet-to-be-released “Elmina” has in an interview with enewsgh.com decried the over glorification of mediocrity in the local industry.
“The movie industry is now choked with mediocrity and that’s a turn off for me personally coming from a production house like Revele,” he says.
“At Revele every film goes through all the film making processes before it’s allowed to hit the market, but now you hardly see that with most of the productions in town.” The lack of resources he adds shouldn’t be used as an excuse to churn out weak movies.
“Sacrifice is making sure we push the limits so the films made here in Ghana meet the demands of the international market.
“That’s a stage we are still refusing to get to but a few houses including Sparrow and Turning Point Pictures are putting in effort and time to give Ghanaian movies a good name and that’s laudable.”
“It’s high time the movie industry is considered more of an industry with a greater goal to sell Ghana’s culture, brands and tell our own stories than limit it to only business where money is being made at the expense of good directing, lighting, casting and a many other factors and term it as sacrifice.”
There are more business men in the industry these days than the artistic people,” he says, adding “the industry needs to wake up to appreciate artistic people and not rely so much on the business people who are just cutting all the possible corners to make their money.”
“When we took “Run Baby Run” to the Africa Movie Academy Awards, the kind of productions we saw was so breathtaking from an artistic point you couldn’t help but marvel at the efforts others were putting in on the other side of the continent.
“So you wonder what exactly we waiting for in Ghana,” Mensah asked.
“These days’ people who know investors pick a word and shoot a whole movie around it while script writers are running around with great stories seeking funding to produce stories with depth and meaning.”
“We are in a new era and things have changed and the old folk running the industry have to wake up and realize all they have to do now is pass the torch to the new generation lighting the industry with their brilliance from time to time to run the systems and carry the industry into this new times with their 21st Century knowledge.”
A fine actor, Redeemer’s love for acting took off at an early stage, taking part in youthful stage productions like KidaFest and FunWorld.
His mainstream success story can be traced to his days at the Julia and Emmanuel Apea-owned Revele Films.
