Films and shows set in Ghana

An honest word about Ghana on screen

Let us be straight from the start: there is no huge library of famous films set in Ghana the way there is for, say, Paris or New York. What exists is a smaller, more interesting collection: a couple of internationally distributed features, a growing wave of Ghanaian arthouse cinema, and an enormous, energetic local film industry that mostly stays inside West Africa. Watch the right handful and you get a real feel for the place.

Screen stories work differently from books. A film gives you the faces, the light, the sound of the language, the look of an Accra street or a fishing village before you ever set foot there. Arrive having watched a few and the country feels half-familiar, which is a lovely way to land.

As a Kasoa-based team who run these trips every week, we often get asked what to watch. This is our honest list: real, findable titles, with a clear note on what each one is and is not. Read it alongside what to know before visiting Ghana for the practical picture to go with the cinematic one.

Beasts of No Nation: filmed in Ghana

The best-known feature shot in Ghana is Beasts of No Nation (2015), directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, starring Idris Elba and the young Ghanaian actor Abraham Attah, whose performance won awards and launched his career. It was one of Netflix's first major original films, and it was filmed largely in Ghana, in the forests and villages of the Eastern Region.

One honest caveat: the story is set in an unnamed West African country during a civil war, not in Ghana specifically, and Ghana itself has been peaceful and stable for decades. So watch it for the landscapes, the light and Attah's extraordinary performance rather than as a portrait of the country you are visiting. The Ghana on screen is a film set standing in for a fictional place.

It is a hard, powerful watch about a child soldier, so go in prepared. But it put Ghanaian talent and Ghanaian locations in front of a global audience, and Abraham Attah remains a point of national pride. If it is the scenery that draws you, know that the peaceful reality of travelling here is a world away from the film's subject.

The Burial of Kojo and the new Ghanaian cinema

For a film made by Ghanaians, about Ghana, watch The Burial of Kojo (2018), the debut feature of Blitz Bazawule, a Ghanaian-American musician and filmmaker also known as Blitz the Ambassador. It is a visually inventive, dreamlike story of two brothers, told partly through the eyes of a young girl, moving between a fishing village and a mining town. It became the first Ghanaian film acquired by Netflix, a genuine milestone.

Bazawule has since gone on to major international projects, but this early film is where his Ghanaian vision is purest. It is beautiful, symbolic and unlike the mainstream local films, and it gives you a sense of the country's landscapes and its storytelling imagination at once.

This new wave of Ghanaian cinema, including films like Azali (2018) and Children of the Mountain (2016), is small but serious, and increasingly visible at festivals. If you want to understand how Ghanaians tell their own stories on screen, this is where to look.

Sankofa: essential before the castles

If your trip includes Cape Coast and Elmina, and it should, watch Sankofa (1993), directed by the Ethiopian-American filmmaker Haile Gerima. It follows a modern woman transported back into slavery, and parts of it were filmed at Cape Coast Castle itself. The word sankofa, from the Akan tradition, means returning to reclaim what has been lost, and it has become a guiding idea for the diaspora's relationship with Ghana.

Watching it before you walk through the castle dungeons deepens the experience enormously. The film is decades old and its style shows its age, but its power and its direct connection to the place you will stand in make it worth seeking out. It is a serious, difficult film about a serious, difficult history.

For the history and the practical plan behind that day, read our Cape Coast and Elmina castles guide, and if you are travelling to Ghana to connect with it as a homeland, our Ghana for African Americans guide speaks to exactly that journey. Film, history and the place itself reinforce one another here.

Homegrown films: everyday Ghana and its humour

To feel the texture of ordinary Ghanaian life, the lighter homegrown films are perfect. Keteke (2017), directed by Peter Sedufia, is a charming comedy set in the 1980s about a couple trying, and comically failing, to catch a train to reach their village before their baby arrives. It is warm, funny and full of the rhythm of rural Ghanaian life, and the title is the local word for train.

The Perfect Picture (2009), directed by Shirley Frimpong-Manso, is a glossy Accra romantic comedy following three friends navigating love and careers in the city; it was a big domestic hit and shows the aspirational, urban side of modern Ghana. Frimpong-Manso is one of the country's most prominent directors.

These films will not win Oscars, and they are not trying to, but they show you how Ghanaians dress, talk, joke and live, from village to city. They are also genuinely enjoyable. Watch one and the street scenes you drive through, explained in our getting around Ghana guide, will feel instantly familiar.

Two more homegrown titles are worth knowing. Azali (2018), directed by Kwabena Gyansah, follows a girl from northern Ghana forced into the city, and was Ghana's submission to the Academy Awards that year, a marker of the local industry's ambition. Children of the Mountain (2016), directed by Priscilla Anany, is a harder, award-winning drama about a mother and her child in a small community, and it does not flinch. Between the comedies and these more serious films, you get the full emotional range of how Ghana sees itself on screen, from the light and aspirational to the difficult and honest.

Ghallywood, Kumawood and the local industry

Here is something worth understanding: West Africa has one of the biggest film industries on earth, and Ghana is part of it. Nigeria's Nollywood is the giant, producing thousands of films a year, and its films are watched everywhere in Ghana. Ghana has its own scene, sometimes called Ghallywood, and a prolific Twi-language industry based in Kumasi often nicknamed Kumawood, which turns out huge numbers of popular local films.

These films are melodramatic, fast and cheap to make, and they are a genuine cultural force. You will see them playing on buses, in bars and on television everywhere you go. They are not arthouse and they are not aimed at foreign audiences, but dipping into one gives you a real sense of popular Ghanaian storytelling, faith, family drama and moral tales included.

You may struggle to find them on international streaming platforms, though many are on YouTube. Do not expect polish; expect energy and enormous local popularity. Understanding that this industry exists, and how much people love it, tells you something true about the country you are visiting that no international film will.

If you are curious, ask your driver-guide what they are watching; you will get an enthusiastic and unfiltered guide to the current hits, the popular actors and the running jokes. It is one of the easiest ways into a real conversation, and it will tell you more about everyday Ghanaian taste than any list a foreigner could compile.

Series and the returnee's Accra

For episodic viewing, An African City is a web series set in Accra that follows a group of women who have returned to Ghana after years abroad, navigating dating, careers, housing and the friction of coming home. It was made independently and found an international following online, and it is sharp about the exact experience many diaspora visitors have: loving the country while wrestling with its practicalities.

It is light, funny and full of real Accra: the neighbourhoods, the restaurants, the dating scene, the generator that kicks in when the power drops. For anyone considering Ghana as more than a holiday, it is a gentle, honest window into daily life in the capital. Watch a couple of episodes and Accra will feel far less foreign when you arrive.

Beyond drama, the Year of Return in 2019 and its aftermath produced a wave of documentary and online content about the diaspora's connection to Ghana, much of it findable online and worth a look if that is why you are coming.

Historical and international films

A few international productions have used Ghana's history and landscapes. The Danish film Gold Coast (2015), directed by Daniel Dencik, dramatises Danish colonial plantations in nineteenth-century Ghana and was filmed on location; it is a sober look at a colonial chapter many visitors know nothing about. Much older and harder to find, Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde (1987) was filmed partly at Elmina Castle and follows a slave trader; it is a dated, strange film, but the Elmina footage is real.

These are niche, and we mention them honestly as such: watch them for the locations and the history rather than expecting masterpieces. They do, however, show corners of Ghana's past, Danish and British colonial history, that rarely make it into the guidebooks and that you will encounter at forts along the coast.

The broader point is that Ghana's coastline, dotted with European forts and castles, is a landscape shaped by centuries of Atlantic history, and film has occasionally reached for it. Seeing that history dramatised, however imperfectly, prepares you for the weight of the real sites.

Where to find these films

Availability shifts constantly, so we will not promise you what is streaming where, because it changes by month and by country. As a general guide, the internationally distributed titles like Beasts of No Nation and The Burial of Kojo have appeared on the major streaming platforms; the Ghanaian arthouse films surface at festivals and on specialist services; the homegrown Ghallywood and Kumawood films live largely on YouTube; and older titles like Sankofa can sometimes be found through restored releases and libraries.

The practical approach is to line up two or three before you travel, download them for the flight, and not worry about seeing everything. A single strong film, watched before you go, does the job of making the country feel real. If Sankofa is not available to you, reading the history instead works just as well before the castles.

Do not turn this into a chore. Pick what appeals, watch it at leisure in the weeks before your trip, and let the images settle. Pair the viewing with our practical Ghana travel tips for first-timers and you arrive with both the feel and the facts in hand.

See the real locations for yourself

Film gives you the images; a trip gives you the real thing, in colour, heat and sound. The castle in Sankofa, the fishing villages of The Burial of Kojo, the Accra streets of An African City: all of them are reachable, and they mean more when you have seen them on screen first.

Ghana Travel & Tour is a Kasoa-based team running private, tailored trips across the country every week, in air-conditioned cars and minibuses with driver-guides who know the coast, the cities and the history behind them. We shape each itinerary around what genuinely interests you, whether that is the slave-route castles, cinematic Accra or the fishing villages of the coast.

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