No Contract, No Acting: GAG Declares

Ghana’s Actors Guild (GAG) has advised its members to put an end to verbal agreements when dealing with film producers who want to use them in their movies.

GAG said its members should sign a detailed contract with the movie producers so as to ensure both parties understand what was expected of them at given time during the film production.

The directive was apparently prompted by the recent issue of controversial bans on some actors by a group of movie producers. The advice was issued at a two-day seminar organized by Federation of International Actors (FIA), Equity UK in collaboration with the Ghana Trade Union Congress (TUC) at Miklin Hotel at East Legon. The seminar, which started on Tuesday December 14 and ended on Wednesday December 15, educated actors on various issues bordering on conflict in the industry.

The ceremony attracted resource person Martin Brown, a member of Equity UK, Tobge Drayi of TUC and Ekow Ansah, CEO of TV Africa who was the chairman of the event.

The first day of the event brought together Majid Michel, Kalsum Sinare, Yvonne Nelson, Luckie Lawson, Martha Ankomah, David Dontoh, Doris Sackitey, Selassi Ibrahim, Adwoa P, Solomon Sampa and a number of other new and old actors, as well as members of the Film Producers Association of Ghana.

Issues that were discussed included working conditions, the rights of artistes and the kind of productions churned into the industry lately. Signing of contract is seen as one way to define the rules of any job of actors, so that if something goes wrong on set, the contract will determine who went wrong.

Ekow Ansah, speaking at the ceremony, said conditions of the job were related to documentary contracts; hence actors should insist on having that done before they accept any job. “This attitude of let’s call actors and put cameras on them and they are gone will not help. It is in the interest of both producers and actors, no matter how small a role, put a paper to it so that in future if there is a conflict, there is a legal document to back it. If these contracts are there, there will be no problem. Let’s do the proper thing and try to build the industry,” he added.

Lawyer B. K. Bosomprah, who spoke on copyright issues, advised movie producers not to take solace in producing more movies without taking into consideration the quality of the movies they do.

He stated that production houses could do one movie for a year and make huge success from it, if they marketed the movie well, adding that they should create links with foreign companies to market Ghanaian movies.