Locarno Backs 'Too Much Music,' a Documentary Reclaiming the Story of Ghanaian Keyboard Prodigy Kiki Gyan
A documentary about Kiki Gyan — the Ghanaian keyboard prodigy who joined the Afro-rock band Osibisa at 15 and shaped African disco and funk across three continents — has won a grant at the Locarno Film Festival's Open Doors program, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter on 16 August 2026.
Aseye Fiagbe, a Ghanaian director whose previous credits include the short film The Gentleman and an episode of the series Bad Mama, is both director and producer of Too Much Music. She is producing through her own Aseye Fiagbe Creative Studio, based in Ghana. The film was presented as a work-in-progress at Open Doors, Locarno's co-production platform and talent development scheme for filmmakers from communities where artistic expression is at risk. This year's edition focused on films from Africa, now in its second iteration with that regional lens. Fiagbe took home one of three Open Doors Grants awarded to selected projects. The Hollywood Reporter
Gyan's story is the kind that a documentary can either flatten or set right. Born on 7 June 1957 in Takoradi, Ghana, he was a child piano virtuoso who joined Osibisa at age 15. He remained in the band from 1974 through mid-1977, contributing to three of the nine studio albums Osibisa recorded in the 1970s, according to the band's official Facebook page. Tensions within the group over credit and ownership pushed him out, and he launched a solo career that took him through London, Lagos, and New York, where he helped shape the sound of African disco and funk.
The arc that most people know, though, is the one that ends badly. Gyan became addicted to drugs, lost everything, and died in June 2004 in a church bathroom in Ghana, as Fiagbe recounts. The Hollywood Reporter notes that his life story has been reduced to a singular narrative of addiction and demise, leaving his musical contributions largely unrecognised. Too Much Music is built from archival material and testimonies from Gyan's family and collaborators, and it asks how artists are remembered, who controls their stories, and what is lost when brilliance is reframed as failure.
For a figure who shaped the sound of a continent from behind the keyboards before the age of 25, that question is not merely rhetorical. Gyan's catalogue — spanning the Afro-rock of Osibisa and his solo disco and funk recordings — remains available on streaming platforms. What it lacks is the context a documentary can provide: the business decisions, the band tensions, the industry structures that shaped what he could and could not do with his talent.
The Open Doors Grant gives Fiagbe both funding and visibility within the festival's co-production market, where producers and sales agents evaluate projects for potential completion financing and distribution. Locarno's official press release on its own domain confirmed Too Much Music among the 2026 Open Doors selection. The film does not yet have a distributor or a release date attached. The Hollywood Reporter
