Ghanaian Video Tales

Tobias Wendel
Ghanaian Video Tales

Abstract: Ghanaian Video Tales introduces the exciting and unique genre of African horror movies - and the filmmakers behind it. Since the early 1990s video technology has deeply changed the African media world. Easy handling and affordable cost of production have enabled filmmakers to tell their own stories for their local audiences. The result has been a growing and bubbling, highly evocative mythology of the modern. The documentary draws the portrait of five Ghanaian filmmakers, actors and producers. It presents original clips from some of their most famous movies: from the initial blockbuster "Zinabu" to the snakeman cycle "Diabolo" about a man who transforms his female victims into money vomitting monsters to some of the more recent demonic stories such as "Babina" and "Satan´s Wife". It includes interviews with the pioneers and protagonists of the scene, everyday observations on set, and last but not least, it follows the way of the films themselves - from production to projection. A tribute to the syncretism of cinema and the power of imagination.

Production Date:
2006

Distributor:
IWF Knowledge and Media
Nonnenstieg 72
D-37075 Goettingen, Germany

Phone:
+49/551/5024-160

Fax: +49/551/5024-322

Email / Website:
vertrieb@iwf.de

http://www.iwf.de/

Running Time: 60

Medium:
DVD

Film Credits:
Tobias Wendl (direction, camera); Thorolf Lipp (editing); Richard Assiamah (sound)

Film Purpose: The film was part of a three year research of Tobias Wendl in an interdisciplinary Project on "Changing Representations of Social Order. Intercultural and Intertemporal Comparisons".

Film Audience: Media anthropologists

Role of the Anthropologist / Collaboration: Tobias Wendl, the anthropologists, did the direction and the shooting of the film.

Filmmaker/anthropologist: Dr. Tobias Wendl, Iwalewa Haus, University of Bayreuth

Keywords: African TV, horror movies, media anthropology