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The Public Relations Officer of the Film Producers Association of Ghana (FIPAG), Michael Kwaku Ola, has revealed that popular Indian telenovela, KumKum Bhagya is negatively affecting sale and consumption of local movies in the country. 
 
In an interview with Showbiz on Monday, Michael said the highly popular telenovela, which is screened on a predominantly Akan television station, with local Akan voice-overs has sparked a trend on other TV stations who are also dubbing over foreign telenovellas with local languages.  

“Members of FIPAG are unhappy with this development and wonder if there is no law in Ghana forcing TV station owners to show more of Ghanaian content than foreign content? Elsewhere, the period from 7pm to 9pm is classified as family belt hours. During these periods only local content is shown on all networks but it doesn't seem to be the case with Ghana. Obonu TV is also showing an Indian soap with GA voice over,” he said. 

Michael Ola added that besides being screened on television during primetime, DVD copies of these telenovellas, which have not been certified and reviewed by the cinematography board, have flooded the market and are competing with local movies in terms of sales.

He blamed TV stations in the country for  contributing to the decline of the local movie industry as a direct of result of demanding huge sums of money from local producers before airing their movies and not giving enough publicity to local movies as they do for foreign ones. 

“Television stations spend huge sums of foreign currency to purchase telenovelas, but see no need to give similar amounts to local producers to produce similar content for them. Even when local producers send content to TV stations, they are asked to pay for the airtime or the TV stations keep most of the advert monies that will be accrued from showing the content. Even with these arrangements, the TV stations do give enough publicity and hype to local content as they do with the foreign ones. This is how our TV stations are crippling local producers and killing the industry in the process,” he said.

Michael Ola, however, admitted that local producers have a lot to learn from the success of locally-dubbed telenovellas such as KumKum Bhagya. 

“The fact that Kumkum Bhagya has a large audience appeal firstly tells us that the Akan language appeals to a lot of Ghanaians and would be profitable taking a look at Akan films and see ways to improve upon it. Film festivals and awards programmes like Fespaco and AMAA largely look out for films told in the African way. So instead of looking down on local productions, let us rather encourage the producers to do more,” he said.

“Voice over dialoguing too should be encouraged among the local film producers to also have French, and may be English voice overs for their films so as to reach out to neighbouring countries of Ghana like Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Nigeria etc.,” he added.

He also asked local producers to improve their production and story value of their movies in order to make them compelling and captivating enough to attract larger audiences.

“Another area to be taken seriously is story treatment for our local films. Obviously, people love these foreign soaps not just because the TV stations spend a lot of air time to hype them but also because their story treatment is captivating enough to make its audience rush home to watch them. If the local producers can learn lessons from this, they will no doubt increase patronage,” he added.