IShowSpeed, the streamer whose legal name is Darren Watkins, is a producer on “The Eyes of Ghana,” a documentary that plays one night only, Wednesday, Oct. 28, in theaters across the United States and Canada. Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers, according to the film’s announcement.
Breakwater Studios and Higher Ground announced the release on Oct. 15. Breakwater, which describes itself as a Los Angeles studio founded in 2012 for short-form humanist storytelling, lists Proudfoot as its founder. Tickets and showtimes are on the film’s website. The announcement lists Regal, AMC, Cinemark and independent cinemas as exhibitors. It does not name individual theaters.
What the Film Follows
Director Ben Proudfoot, a two-time Academy Award winner, built the 90-minute film around Chris Hesse, a Ghanaian cinematographer who was personal cameraman to Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first president. The film’s website says Hesse, now 93, filmed for about a decade until the 1966 coup that removed Nkrumah.
The site says the coup makers reportedly burned footage, and that Hesse has spent decades preserving the reels that survived. The story centers on a race to rescue and return that footage while Hesse’s eyesight fails. The announcement says the reels document Africa’s independence struggle in the 1950s and 1960s and were hidden after Nkrumah’s overthrow.
The film’s own materials disagree on the size of the archive. The announcement says Hesse is saving more than 1,000 films. The film’s website uses “over 1,000+ reels” in one section and “over 1,300 films” in its synopsis. This article uses the 1,000 figure that both documents share.
Anita Afonu, a Ghanaian filmmaker and archivist, is a producer and appears in the film. She told the newsletter The Produced in a Sept. 25, 2025 interview that the Nkrumah-era negatives sit in vaults in London because Ghana lacked the facilities to store them. The interview also says she previously directed “Perished Diamonds,” which traces the history of Ghanaian cinema, and that Hesse has pushed for about six decades to have the Nkrumah-era films digitized. “Our work is to bring them home to the people they belong to,” she said in that interview.
Who Made It and Where It Has Played
The announcement credits Watkins, who is known online as IShowSpeed, as one of eight producers, alongside Proudfoot, Nana Adwoa Frimpong, Moses Bwayo, Afonu, Brandon Somerhalder, Ethan Lewis and Vinnie Malhotra. The Obamas share executive producer credits with Sir John Akomfrah, Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, Paula Madison and several others named in the announcement.
Ethan Lewis, head of non-fiction at Higher Ground, said in the announcement that Hesse spent more than six decades documenting and safeguarding a chapter of Ghanaian and African history. IShowSpeed said in the same announcement that he is “humbled by his legacy” and proud to help bring the story to his community.
The announcement says Somerhalder shot parts of the film on IMAX 65mm, with the camera supplied by IMAX. Kris Bowers wrote the score, recorded with the Chineke! Orchestra and Ghanaian musicians at Abbey Road Studios in London. The film opened the documentary program at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, according to a festival press release dated Aug. 6, 2025.
The festival ran Sept. 4 to 14. The BFI London Film Festival listed it in its Documentary Competition. The BFI listing gives the languages as English, Twi and Ga, with English subtitles. It credits the film as a 2025 production made in the United States, courtesy of Breakwater.
The announcement also lists these honors:
- Special Jury Prize and Best Documentary at the Africa International Film Festival in Lagos
- Audience awards at the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Annapolis Film Festival
- The Jimmy Stewart Legacy Award at the Heartland Film Festival
How Much of the Archive Has Been Saved
The Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s state broadcaster, interviewed Proudfoot in April at the film’s Ghana premiere at the National Theatre in Accra. In its own report, GBC wrote that about 15 minutes of footage has been recovered and that more than 300 hours of original negatives remain in a London vault. GBC reported that Proudfoot said age and chemical decay threaten the rest and that preservation needs coordination among government bodies, cultural agencies and international partners.
Here is the arithmetic, calculated from GBC’s two figures. 300 hours is 18,000 minutes. Fifteen minutes is about 0.08% of that, or roughly one minute in every 1,200. GBC does not say whether the 15 minutes is the amount restored, the amount used in the film or the amount cleared for viewing, so the figure describes what has been recovered and not how much is safe from decay.
GBC’s separate report on the Accra premiere says Proudfoot first met Hesse when Hesse was 90. Journalist Justice Baidoo introduced them, and Hesse told Proudfoot about a secret archive of more than 1,000 films. Frimpong, a producer, said the project aimed to “reconnect Africans with their own stories,” according to GBC. Proudfoot told the audience he hoped the film would be screened free of charge in Ghanaian schools.
At the Accra event, Afonu paid tribute to the custodian of the Rex Cinema as a symbol of Ghana’s once-thriving communal cinema culture, GBC reported.
GBC wrote in an Oct. 17 report that IShowSpeed’s visit to Ghana earlier this year deepened his connection to the country. GBC also reported that no dates have been announced for a theatrical release in Ghana or the United Kingdom.
For now, the Oct. 28 screening is the only wide date. Showtimes at each theater are posted on the film’s website, which also offers the trailer, press materials and a City Captain application for people who want to organize screenings in their own cities. The site quotes reviews from Variety, IndieWire and TheWrap, and describes Hesse’s collection as the largest existing archive of Ghana’s liberation story.
