NewsThe film studio Nkrumah built is now TV3: how Ghana sold the GFIC
The Ghana Film Industry Corporation was set up at Kanda to tell Ghana's own story. In 1996 the state sold 70% of it to a Malaysian TV company, and the films it made are still unaccounted for.
TV3's home at Kanda, in Accra, was built to make films. It was the base of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC), the state studio set up under Kwame Nkrumah's government in the 1960s.
A studio for Ghana's own story
Film in the colony started as a government tool. In 1948 the British set up the Gold Coast Film Unit inside the Information Services Department, and its vans toured villages giving free film shows.
After independence, Nkrumah's government built the GFIC at Kanda (most accounts date it to 1964), with production and editing facilities and a share of the country's cinemas. Young Ghanaians were sent abroad to train.
Quiet years, then video
After the 1966 coup, output collapsed. SA History Online counts about 20 Ghanaian films made between 1966 and the 1980s.
By the 1980s celluloid was too expensive and the GFIC could not fund new work. William Akuffo shot Zinabu on a home video camera and premiered it at the Globe Cinema in 1987, staged to look like a normal film screening. Lighting man Steve Asare Hackman later recalled that the night did not go well, with bad pictures and poor sound (his own account). The format caught on anyway: two video films in 1988, seven in 1991 and more than fifty in 1993.
The sale
In 1996 the government sold 70% of the GFIC to a Malaysian company, Sistem Televisyen Malaysia Berhad, and it was renamed Gama Media System Ltd. The premises later became home to TV3.
Director Kwaw Ansah, whose films include Love Brewed in the African Pot and Heritage Africa, called the acquisition "another heavy blow for our industry" and has said much of the corporation's footage has gone to waste. In 2013 a MyJoyOnline writer asked who now owns the films made under the GFIC. No clear public answer has followed.
Production did not stop. It moved to cheaper cameras, smaller rooms and Kumasi, where the Kumawood industry grew up on the same low-budget model Akuffo started.
We built a studio to tell our own story, then sold it when it was struggling and lost track of what it made. The cameras moved to Kumasi and to phones, but the archive of our first films is the part we can't get back.
- Wikipedia: Cinema of Ghana (Gold Coast Film Unit, 1948; GFIC at Kanda, 1964; 70% sold in 1996 and renamed Gama Media; the premises later housed TV3)
- SA History Online: Ghallywood, the evolution of Ghana's film industry (Gold Coast Film Unit 1948; about 20 films from 1966 to the 1980s; 70% to the Malaysian company)
- Wikipedia: Zinabu (premiered at the Globe Cinema, 1987; 2 video films in 1988, 7 in 1991, over 50 in 1993)
- AfricanFilmNY: Ghanaian Film Industry, Past and Present (Kwaw Ansah, Jun 2026)
- MyJoyOnline: Who killed the Ghana film industry? (29 Oct 2013)
Every factual line in this story is checked against at least two independent sources, unless the text says it comes from one report.