Buying DVDs in Ghana

I thought it might be interesting to take a break from reviewing and analysing films to let all of you in on how buying DVDs works in Ghana. Needless to say, every aspect of life here is different – eating, drinking, driving, communicating, everything - so naturally, buying films is a different experience as well. However, I didn’t realise the extent of the difference until I actually went out to buy films.
I expected that DVDs, like most things, would be cheaper here than in America. I had been told that I would easily find bootlegged films for sale. What I did not realise was that bootlegged films are all there is to buy. From where I am staying, I can walk for about ten minutes, get in a cab for about ten more minutes, and then get out and walk some more. Once all this is done, I will be in a market, and here there are a couple of carts, completely covered with films. Now, it’s not like you can just go up to them and tell them which movies you want – each disc on the stand has about eighteen films on it, all transferred on at a very low quality, so you are going to have to stand around for a while looking through them to see what you might want.
They are, of course, only likely to have the big name movies of the past ten years, plus a couple of more classic epic and war films. The Ghanaians are much more interested in an aesthetic film experience than an intellectual one, so period pieces are quite popular. One of the discs I bought has Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and Robin Hood, as well as 300, Spartacus, Troy, Alexander, The Last of the Mohicans, and a bunch of other films in it. Another typical disc might have someone like Whoopi Goldberg or Johnny Depp on the cover, and then include a number of their movies. 

 
There is artwork to go along with each disc, photoshopped to include characters from the different movies you are going to buy. I have included a picture of a couple of them to give you a real sense of how weird they are. Anyway, the DVDs come out to be about 1.50 Ghana Cedi, or roughly eighty cents, which is a good bargain when you’re considering each DVD has almost twenty films on it. Unfortunately, the old truism “you get what you pay for” rings true with these discs. I was lucky enough to know someone in the area, and he allowed me to test the DVDs I was buying before I took them home. About half of them didn’t work, so I took them back and exchanged them, and kept repeating this process until all the films I was buying worked. Then when I got them home, I found that not all of the films on the discs work. Oh well, that’s Ghana for you. The films themselves are of varying qualities, some of them are overdubbed in French, and some of them have subtitles that lag behind about five minutes, which can be very distracting. But hey, I now have almost twenty Bruce Lee films that I paid less than a dollar for, so I’m not complaining.
One last thought – here you can buy any “foreign” movie in bootleg form, no problem, but they do crack down on bootleg Ghanaian films. I’ll be blunt and avoid euphemisms: Ghanaian films are bad. The writing, the acting, and the camera work are all very amateur, and not very entertaining, but in a country without the infrastructure to produce quality films, no one is really to blame. Most of the movies focus on a character performing feats of magic, or fighting in an epic battle, and there is usually gratuitous soft-core pornography. Since I am teaching literature here, I have read a couple Ghanaian books, and know that there are quality storytellers in this country, but they are not the ones making movies.