The Eyes of Ghana
2025 | Coast Film & Music Festival
Duration: 90 min
Synopisis
From Oscar®-winning director Ben Proudfoot, THE EYES OF GHANA is a stunning feature documentary following 93-year-old documentarian Chris Hesse—personal cinematographer to forgotten African icon Kwame Nkrumah—as he races against blindness and time to rescue and repatriate a secret trove of over 1,000 films that captured the birth of African independence in the fifties and sixties. Yet unseen by the public, these films may not only rewrite Ghanaian and African history—but world history itself.
Featured at Coast Film & Music Festival 2025
Production Team
A two-time Academy Award®-winning documentary director and entrepreneur, Ben Proudfoot is the creative force behind Breakwater Studios. Proudfoot’s films have played at festivals including Tribeca, Sundance and Telluride. A watershed partnership with The New York Times produced some sixteen collaborations with over 10 million views including A Concerto is a Conversation, which was nominated for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 93rd Academy Awards®, and The Queen of Basketball, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 94th Academy Awards®.
On March 10, 2024, Proudfoot won a second Academy Award®, this time for The Last Repair Shop. Proudfoot views real-world impact as a film’s highest achievement, advocating for The Queen of Basketball’s Lusia Harris’ legacy as a unsung basketball pioneer, and inspiring a $15M capital campaign for the repair facility in The Last Repair Shop.
Today, Breakwater Studios has expanded to multiple studio facilities in Los Feliz, where Proudfoot proudly leads twenty-three full-time filmmaking staff producing original documentaries with trusted partners like Google, LinkedIn, UNICEF, L’Oréal Paris, and Charles Schwab. Proudfoot was named one of Forbes "30 Under 30" for his leadership and innovation. He hails from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Proudfoot is an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician and has performed at The Magic Castle in Los Angeles.