Actress and producer Yvonne Okoro and veteran filmmaker Shirley Frimpong-Manso have challenged Ghanaians to support their own film industry, arguing that audiences often embrace foreign productions while overlooking local work.
Speaking to Kwame Dadzie on Joy FM’s Showbiz A-Z, Okoro said Ghanaian filmmakers were working hard to survive but faced audiences more interested in finding faults than buying tickets.
According to MyJoyOnline, she said viewers could enjoy poor films from other countries while judging Ghanaian productions more harshly. Her conclusion was direct: “We do not support our own.”
Okoro said some plainly weak Hollywood films still received praise, while Nigerian YouTube productions were often described as excellent. By contrast, she said a disappointing Ghanaian film could lead viewers to conclude that Ghanaians were incapable of making good movies.
She also said some people claimed they had never heard about successful Ghanaian films, despite months of promotion before their release.
Frimpong-Manso raised a similar concern during an appearance on Showbiz A-Z on October 24, 2026. GhanaWeb reported that she was dissatisfied with the comparatively low number of YouTube views earned by her films.
The programme’s host said For Love and Country had received about 554,000 views a year after its release. Frimpong-Manso responded that the figure should have been much higher, noting that some Nigerian productions attract between five and 15 million views within a week. She described those figures as “crazy”.
Although she acknowledged that Nigeria’s population is much larger than Ghana’s, Frimpong-Manso said size alone did not explain the difference. She and her colleagues had worked, premiered films and conducted business in Nigeria, she said, and the industry there was “no bed of roses”.
However, she added that Nigerian support for online content was immediately apparent. She questioned why people in Ghana continued to ask where local films were while failing to attend screenings or support productions that had already been made.
Frimpong-Manso made a similar argument in a 2025 Hitz FM interview reported by 3News, insisting that Ghana’s film industry was not dead. She said Nigeria had made a deliberate investment in film through funding and cinemas.
Her latest comedy, Agency for the Dead, opens in Ghanaian cinemas on Friday, October 30, 2026, including Silverbird Cinemas in Accra.
The film uses Ghanaian folklore and childhood ghost stories to explore supernatural beliefs through comedy. At its media premiere on October 20, Frimpong-Manso called it perhaps the purest comedy her team had produced, saying her main aim was to make people laugh.
She told GhanaWeb that she had intentionally selected performers with a natural ability for comedy. The film runs for close to an hour and 45 minutes.
Its cast includes Yvonne Okoro, Joselyn Dumas, Anita Erskine, David Dontoh, George Quaye, Mawuli Gavor, Omari Dwamena and Rhoda Ampene.
Okoro said at a special screening that she had initially been reluctant to join the project because she was at school preparing for exams. After reading the script, however, she said: “You can’t say no to Shirley.”
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