Shattered Lives, a real lifestyle depicted in a movie – Shatta Wale

To be honest, Shatta Wale is one of the revolutionary artists in recent times. Aside the fact that his utterances and opinions about the industry is mostly harsh or even unacceptable, he most of the times speaks the facts without fear or regret. His transparency has made him survive the test of time from 2013 till date and still counting!!! Well let me brief you about a new movie which he happens to be part of the main characters. It’s titled “Shattered Lives”.

The movie depicts the real life(style) of Charles Nii Mensah Jnr better known as Shatta Wale. According to him in an exclusive interview with Sammy Flex, host of ‘Showbiz Agenda’ on Zylofon 102.1 fm on 16/2/2018 he affirmed that “I have been on set with directors but i think i like ‘Kofas’ very well but let me just give thumbs up to ‘Kobby Rana’. He directed this movie that we shot and  he actually played  me a role as Shatta Wale.

The movie is all about Shatta Wale, i was behaving like myself, i was in the movie with my militants and my boys; Pope Skinny, everybody so it made me feel like comfortable. Basically what we wanted to portray is, when we watch Mexicans movies, Italian movies, we see Ghanaians forgetting our culture  and i like been in Zylofon, i feel we have an agenda to really put the culture out there. So basically i think this movie is all about how we live and anybody who watches the movie will know that this is how Shatta lives with his boys.

We speak out pidgin, our normal things that we do in our daily lives and i feel that can also sell our country because people might want to see what we do”.

The concept of the movie is groundbreaking judging from Shatta’s assertion, isn’t it? I don’t want to believe i want the only one who Shatta’s statement makes sense to, but i want to think it is an awaken call for Ghana particularly the movie, music and the entire creative industry. It would be advisable if the movies / music industry would take key notice of the points the SM boss has made with respect to good visual contents, culture and heritage promo in our various artistic crafts. It’s been too long a time to be living in the shadows of other people’s culture while there are beautiful untold Ghanaian stories.

I want to attach weight to the fact that if our script writers, movie directors, actors/actresses, artists, producers and anyone who falls within the circle of the movie / music industry there would be a well packaged mind-blowing projects when considering marketing and selling our cultural heritage, tourist sites, natural resources just to mention a few to the international market and outside world. ‘The daily live of village farmers or the hulkers on the street is even enough to tell our stories’. We need to go back into our archives, dig down into history, if possible map out a research plan to gather vital historic records from assorted historians from different institutions, archaeologists and involve anyone who has any in-dept knowledge about the history of Ghana. I stand to be corrected, up till now there is no single movie that tells the story about how we gained independence as a nation.

There are till untold stories of our past heroes like The Big Six, Kofi Annan, Professor Allotey, Ephraim Amu, Philip Gbeho, Yaa Asantewaa, Okomfo Anokye, Torgbui Tsali, King Agorkoli and the likes.

Due to lack of content, various telenovelas has taken over our most of our TV stations.This is because we are not authentic enough so we end up portraying other peoples culture so viewers have no option than to fall in love with foreign contents.

Foreign content producers have done their market research properly to identify their target market and what is lacking in the system whereas capitalizing on it  as well as been smart enough to feed the demands of society by selling the culture in a well branded and strategic packaged manner which we ignorantly embrace with so much love and excitement to the extent that there are professionals who translate some of these foreign languages to attract more viewers. What is preventing us from been creative and stepping out of our comfort zones?

We have to wake up and reshape our way of thinking and executing necessary tasks. Shattered Lives is a movie to anticipate for!!! I’ll be discussing other trendsetting issues he spoke about in subsequent articles.

(Story by: John Claude Tamakloe)