Chris Tsui Hesse

Rev Dr Christian Tsui Hesse, popularly known as Chris Hesse, is a Ghanaian cinematographer, film administrator and Presbyterian minister. He was the official cameraman of Kwame Nkrumah from 1956 to 1966, and the reels he saved from that era are the subject of The Eyes of Ghana, a documentary whose 2026 cinema release is backed by Barack and Michelle Obama and the streamer IShowSpeed.

Early life and training

Hesse was born on 29 August 1932 at Osu in Accra. He attended Salem School in Osu and Odorgonno Secondary School, where he obtained the Cambridge Overseas Certificate in 1954. He trained as a filmmaker at the National Film School in Lodz, Poland, graduating in 1960, and later earned a postgraduate certificate in Film and TV Arts at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Film career

He joined the Gold Coast Film Unit, later the Ghana Film Industry Corporation (GFIC), in 1954 and stayed for four decades. Between 1956 and 1966 he filmed Nkrumah at home and abroad, covering independence, the 1957 celebrations and conferences of the United Nations, the Commonwealth, the OAU and the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1960 he documented the Congo crisis for worldwide distribution while serving as an honorary captain with the UN peacekeeping force. He went on to film later heads of state, including Jerry Rawlings.

At GFIC he headed the News Department from 1974 to 1984 and was managing director for ten years until he retired from government service in 1994. He was director of photography on Kwaw Ansah's Love Brewed in the African Pot (1980) and Heritage Africa (1989), and on His Majesty's Sergeant (1984). He won the Golden Camera award for cinematography at FESPACO in Ouagadougou in 1985, and is a founding member and former president of the Ghana Academy of Film and Television Arts.

The Nkrumah reels and The Eyes of Ghana

After the 1966 coup that removed Nkrumah, the new government burned many films made by his administration. Hesse kept more than 1,300 reels of footage, over 200 hours of film, which were later stored in a vault in London. The Eyes of Ghana, directed by Ben Proudfoot, follows him in his nineties as he passes the reels to a younger filmmaker, Anita Afonu, and tries to hold a public screening of footage never shown before in Accra.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 4 September 2025 and won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Hamptons International Film Festival. Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers through Higher Ground, and in October 2026 IShowSpeed announced he had joined as a producer. A one-night screening in cinemas across the United States and Canada was set for 28 October 2026.

Ministry and family

Hesse was ordained in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in 1985 and served several congregations. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity in 1985 and a PhD in 1989 from the University of Southern California, and became executive director of the Prisons Ministry of Ghana. He has been married to Regina Hesse, a retired Bank of Ghana officer, since 1959, and they have five children.