Ghana's film posters win fans

The image above reveals movie posters painted by local Ghanaian artists at an exhibition in Accra, Ghana. Local artists earn around $56 (40 euros) for each poster painted outside Ghana and can sell for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

ACCRA (AFP) - In Ghana's capital, people flocking into theatres to watch the British horror film "Dog Soldiers" is the effect caused by Oko Afutu: a poster showing a werewolf biting off a man's head.

Each poster Afutu paints earns him about $56. "The major appeal to them is the mystery", said Brian Chankin, who collects Ghanaian movie posters and displays them at his Chicago video rental store.

"The misspellings don't matter; the placement of characters on the canvas is always a little bit awkward. It's all in the flavour, that's for sure".

If a movie is bloody, his posters will be bloody; if there's nudity, there's nudity on the poster. "That poster will attract them to go and watch the movie", said Afutu, who has been painting since 1988.

"The way they will think of the movie will be (as) a wicked or hard movie".

When anthropologist Frimpong found a batch of old movie posters being sold off by a cinema, he started collecting them, eventually gathering about 100.

"These are not naive or immature, these roadside artists", Frimpong said at a recent exhibition of 1980s Ghanaian movie posters at the Alliance Francaise cultural organisation in Accra.

"These are really creative people". 

They made their images and often they were very exotic. The Ghanaian posters now sell for anywhere from a few hundred dollars to the high thousands of dollars, Chankin said.

"I showed 'Pinhead' to Clive Barker and he just couldn't believe that they had taken his image and taken it to a completely another place", Wolfe said, about the "Hellraiser" movie franchise.

"It's my job, so I always have to do it", Afutu said.