Kwaw Paintsil Ansah
Kwaw Paintsil Ansah is a film director, screenwriter, producer and playwright regarded in many circles as Ghana’s most influential filmmaker.
He has been a storyteller throughout his adult life by way of his work in advertising, plays, films and design. Very few people know that he designed some of Ghana’s popular wax print cloths such as Abban Nkaba and You Too Can Fly.
Born in 1941 to a photographer, dramatist and musician father and an entrepreneur mother, Ansah’s breakthrough as a film director came in 1980 with Love Brewed In The African Pot. Until that film came along, it was only the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC) that made feature films in Ghana and they were all funded by the government. Nobody had any track record of having produced a feature with privately-raised funds. Ansah has said on several occasions that it took about eight months to complete the script and eight years to source funding for the film. The success of Love Brewed on both the local and international film circuits strengthened his belief that calculated risks were worth taking. Another worthy lesson Love Brewed taught Ansah was the need for Africa’s creative legion to constantly draw on local culture and experience. He is always proud to draw on Ghanaian aesthetic milieu to construct narratives that resonate with people everywhere.
As an acclaimed filmmaker, Ansah’s other works include Heritage Africa; Crossroads Of People, Crossroads of Trade; The Good Old Days; Suffering To Lose; The Love Of AA and Papa Lasisi Bicycle. Though a staunch Pan-Africanist, Ansah believes that Africans telling stories to the world must not develop emotional attachments to what they consider as their relevant values and just proclaim them without regard to requisite artistic merits.
He sees relevant training as important for success and that’s why despite the early surge of artistic talent in his life, he strived to study theatre design, music and filmmaking at institutions such as the London Polytechnic in the United Kingdom and the America Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
He also won a grant which enabled him understudy film production at the famous RKO Studios in Hollywood. Respect and admiration for his general body of work have come in the form of several awards in Ghana, Burkina Faso, United Kingdom, India and other places. He has served on the board of several organizations and has also been a film training consultant to UNESCO. Ansah is also the founder of the Bisa Abrewa Museum in Sekondi in the Western Region which further underscores his belief that Africans must communicate their values and beliefs at all times.