IShowSpeed is a movie producer now. The 21 year old streamer, real name Darren Watkins Jr., has joined “The Eyes of Ghana” as a producer, on the same film Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producing through their company Higher Ground.
The announcement came Thursday with the official trailer. The film gets one night in theaters across the United States and Canada on October 28, at Regal, AMC, Cinemark and select independent cinemas.
The film is about Chris Hesse, a 93 year old Ghanaian cameraman who was personal cameraman to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president. After Nkrumah was removed in a 1966 coup, footage Hesse had shot was ordered destroyed. He quietly kept more than 1,000 reels safe for decades.
Now, with his eyesight failing, Hesse is working with young Ghanaian filmmaker Anita Afonu to restore the archive, building toward a screening at the historic Rex Cinema in Accra. It was directed by two time Academy Award winner Ben Proudfoot and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025.
“His camera captured the birth of African independence.”
IShowSpeed, on Chris Hesse
Speed’s connection is not random. He visited Ghana in January during his “Speed Does Africa” tour, told his audience it felt like home, and said his ancestry traces back to Ghana. On that trip he posed at the Nkrumah monument, the same leader Hesse spent years filming.
That is the real play. Speed reaches more than 60 million subscribers on YouTube alone, an audience that was never going to find this film on its own. Now it lands in front of them.
Tickets at TheEyesOfGhana.com. Photo: Diego Serrano via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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