Socrate Sarfo, Chairman of the National Films Authority (NFA) has indicated that Ghanaian filmmakers are unable to produce movies in recent years because they have sold their market to free-to-air TV stations.
Speaking to Youtuber Gordon Asare-Bediako on MYABC TV, the NFA Chairman stated that, filmmakers initially were making immense profits from their work until they decided to give their creations to free-to-air TV channels just to skip paying a fee for adverts.
He explained that it got to a point where producers were able to get GHc 2.5 million out of the sales of their movies in Accra alone not to even talk of Kumasi.
However, their maker value began to dwindle when they sold their movies to TV stations at low cost.
“Previously we used to sell 100,000 copies of our movies in Accra Opera Square alone.
If you release one film, you can sell about 100,000 copies in Accra. Every week, at least we released about 5 movies and were able to sell 100,000 within one month.
Producers were able to get GHc 2.5 million out of these sales in Accra alone not to talk about Kumasi.” Socrate Sarfo disclosed.
He revealed further that, consumers did not stop buying their films, but when they started giving their movies to TV stations to show, the buyers decided to stop because a TV station will show them free of charge.
“Our consumers didn’t say they won’t purchase our products, but we the filmmakers because of greed made a mistake by giving our films to TV stations to show instead of paying a fee to advertise for us.
We gave them our old films to show in order to advertise our new movies.
We gave the TV stations part 1 of our movies. It worked for us all right but later they demanded part 2 which we did. So they started piling up our movies to show on their network. Gradually, people who use to buy our movies got interested in watching our films on TV stations than buying our movies.
“People were watching our movies on TV stations so most of the stations came to us and purchased our old movies. Initially, they use to buy from us at high prices (GHc5000) but later they were buying it as low as GHc200.
“Now you will see a filmmaker selling his numerous films to TV stations but his senses didn’t tell him he was selling his future.”
“It is the major thing, nothing more, nothing less, that destroyed our market.” Socrate Sarfo lamented.
He indicated further, “If you go to Opera Square in Accra and other places no one sells movies again. When we started giving our movies to TV stations, all the cinema halls collapsed.”
