While Akosua Adoma Owusu’s film Kwaku Ananse is on view at the Institute of Contemporary art, the Ghanaian-American filmmaker discusses the personal nature of this work with Rissa Papillion of Indiewire:
“I was making this film to let go of a lot of frustration I had built up around my father’s death, and making this film was a way for me to make peace with that grief… The hardest part of making this film was the funeral scene because I was restaging my father’s funeral with family members on both my mother’s side and father’s side of the family as characters in Kwaku Ananse’s funeral. And, the challenging part was working as a producer and director of Kwaku Ananse, a story that is my most personal film-to-date, with cast and crew from different countries who didn’t have sensitivity to my culture and my process of making films. It was challenging to communicate to them what I was even trying to achieve.”