Ghanaian filmmaker Anita Afonu is passionate about the preservation of Ghana's cinematic history. With enthusiasm and hope, she talks about her film Perished Diamonds which relates the history of Ghanaian cinema, and the initiative to restore its hidden and lost legacy.

Anita, you are a graduate of the Ghanaian film school NAFTI. Talk about how you came to cinema and a bit about the film school and its mission.

I attended the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI) from 2006 to 2010 where I pursued a programme in Film Directing with an option in documentary filmmaking. I had always wanted to be a filmmaker because to me, having the ability to tell a story and have an audience watch your film meant that you wield a lot of power and therefore can change the perceptions and idiosyncrasies of people through film.

The National Film and Television Institute was established in 1978 to train people to produce films and other audiovisual material for the government of Ghana. The school offers a four-year bachelor degree programme in all aspects of filmmaking.

I was a privileged spectators at the screening of your film Perished Diamonds, a documentary about the history of Ghanaian cinema. I was touched by your in depth research and your tremendous will to get it made. What motivated you to make the film?

I was sorting out films at the Information Services Department for my friend Jennifer Blaylock, a cinema archivist who had come to do some research on Ghanaian cinema. While working with the films, I saw how dilapidated the Information Services Department was and how the film reels had been left to go bad. I also realized that I had not seen most of these films. I thought, "Here I am, a film school graduate calling myself a filmmaker". I thought that is was rather ironic, asking myself what had happened. Why had the film reels been left to go bad? And it broke my heart to personally discard some of the films because they had gone mouldy, in an almost soup-like state. I felt that if I could trace the origin of the problem and find a way to repair the damage, things could improve. I knew that if I made a film about these conditions people would wake up. And that's what motivated me to make this film. Jennifer was very supportive and we put together a proposal to the Goethe Institute which funded the film.

You have also researched the history of Ghanaian cinema and cinema in Ghana that is related in the film. Give some background on Ghanaian cinema history and your process in learning about it.

Generally, cinema was used by the colonizers to instil in Africans, and Ghanaians in this case, an attitude of subservience. The films were mainly instructional materials about keeping homes clean, accepting Jesus Christ and embracing Christianity, and others along this line. The West African Film School was set up in 1948 to train people in film to essentially work as assistants to British filmmakers who were commissioned to come to Ghana to make propaganda films.

READ MORE at African Women in Cinema Blog