Kris Bowers Calls His Score for The Eyes of Ghana a Love Letter to Ghana
Composer Kris Bowers calls his score for the documentary The Eyes of Ghana "a love letter to Ghana and to the history of film." He spoke about the work at Deadline's Sound & Screen Film event, where a live orchestra performed parts of the music, Deadline reported on 10 November.
The film is directed by Ben Proudfoot. Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers, and content creator IShowSpeed is on board as a producer. It follows Chris Hesse, a 93-year-old who was the personal cinematographer of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first President.
Nkrumah was toppled in 1966 in a military coup that Deadline describes as CIA-orchestrated. Films made during his time were reportedly ordered to be burned. Hesse kept the surviving celluloid films from Africa's liberation era safe for more than 60 years.
Bowers and Proudfoot have worked together before. Their 2023 short The Last Repair Shop won the Documentary Short Film Oscar in 2024. Bowers came to this project after Proudfoot sent him a sizzle reel, a short promotional clip used to pitch a film.
The film's release has been unusual. It played as a one-night theatrical event, meaning a single evening of screenings in cinemas, across the United States and Canada on 28 October. It has since had a sold-out run at DocHouse, a cinema in London, and it screened at the Dikan Center in Accra, Ghana.
What stands out is how the music was presented. A live orchestra played parts of the score in a room full of people, rather than the music being heard only through a film's soundtrack. For a story about film that survived, that choice puts the sound in front of an audience, not only on a screen.
Bowers' own words, as quoted by Deadline, put the film's aim in personal terms. He frames the score as a tribute, both to the country and to the medium that kept its story alive.
