Film maker learns new lessons in Ghana

An African Election marked a coming home for Jarreth Merz anafrican election.com

Swiss-Ghanaian documentary film maker Jarreth Merz has set his latest production against the backdrop of Ghana’s national election in 2008.

The actor, director and producer who was brought up in Ghana, Germany and Switzerland, told swissinfo.ch An African Election was the beginning of his journey back to the Africa of his childhood, a free and happy time, which all came to an abrupt end after his return to Switzerland.

Merz, who was in London to promote the film, gives his audience a behind-the-scenes look at the democratic process in the West African country. He ventures down the back streets of Accra, into the homes of presidential candidates and, most revealingly, gets unprecedented access to Ghana’s political “strong room”, which exposes the inner workings of West African electioneering. 

swissinfo.ch: You have talked about the need to “shed your skin, in order to fit in” in Switzerland. Was this one of the reasons why you became an actor?

Jarreth Merz: Absolutely. You let everything go from your past and re-invent yourself. You learn to identify 100 per cent with the characters you are portraying. But then it got to the point I started questioning why I had to keep reinventing myself.

It also didn’t help that, as an actor, I was being typecast as the exotic African, the drug dealing African or the African terrorist. There comes a point where you wonder how many terrorists you want to play. I felt trapped again and needed to break out of this cage. I was imploding and needed to explode. So I went full circle, basically going back to Ghana to find the traces of the past to know who I am in the present.

swissinfo.ch: You hadn’t been in Ghana for 28 years. What was it like going back there?

J.M.: Oh my God, it was so refreshing. You step off the plane, touch the ground and you start crying. What’s it called? Mal d’Afrique? It was very inspiring. It felt like coming home and I needed that. At the same time, there’s that romantic notion where the memories are often stronger and the mind tends to bend them to make them the best.

However, I was shocked at how backwards life was for much of the population. I couldn’t understand why. It was almost heartbreaking.

swissinfo.ch: It must have been particularly uplifting to experience how, despite this poverty, which was evident in your film, the bulk of the nation was determined to participate in a fair and democratic election.

J.M.: That was the turning point in my whole search for identity. I had been in denial of my African heritage by being conditioned that everything coming out of Africa was terrible and a failure. Filming this presidential election made me so proud and it instilled in me a sense of integrity. The people cared. Democracy was shown to work better in Ghana than in a lot of places in the West.

Strangely, this wasn’t the film I had planned to make. It presented itself to me. It began innocently as a journey looking for traces of my childhood. In the end, maybe my search for identity could be compared with the search for Ghana’s identity in its democratic culture – so to speak. It was as if we stumbled upon each other.

swissinfo.ch: And how do you feel now coming to the end of that journey?

J.M.: You know, this is just the beginning of the next phase of the journey. We are now planning to travel with the film. Both Zimbabwe and Kenya are interested in using the film as an outreach platform to show and educate people about the importance of the democratic process. The project is called “A Political Safari” and we plan to distribute the film at grass roots level in the towns and villages across Africa. The aim is to engage people in a creative and constructive dialogue about peaceful elections.

This film shows Ghana is a positive example of democracy, but also that you cannot ever take democracy for granted. It’s a very fragile process and it is important to be aware of that.

swissinfo.ch: Have you now closed some doors?

J.M.: I am now ready to move onto other projects. Of course, I’ll continue with the political safari but I also accept the search for identity doesn’t start and end here, it’s a continuous journey and that is what makes life so much fun. The search never stops.

Ghana

Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa (in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership) to gain its independence from Britain. It was also a country where that promise of freedom dissipated as Nkrumah went to one-party rule and ended up overthrown in a coup in 1966.

The presidential contest in 2008 was the fifth national election since a multi-party democracy was reintroduced in 1992 after a series of military regimes.

John Atta Mills took office as president of Ghana with a difference of about 40,000 votes (0.46%) between his party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP). This victory marked the second time that power had been transferred from one legitimately elected leader to another and secured Ghana’s status as a stable democracy.

Jarreth Merz

Studied directing at the New York University and with Salem Ludwig at HB-Studio in New York.

In 2006,  founded Urban Republic Films. Projects include: Abeka Junction, a mystery thriller set in Africa that he developed with his brother Kevin Merz, and Spurlos (Without a Trace), a drama set in Switzerland and based on a true story.

Has worked extensively in film, television and theatre. Perhaps best known for his recurring role as Charles Baruani in the US medical drama, ER, and for his portrayal of Simon of Cyrene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.   

Merz on Switzerland: “Switzerland represented for me a break in that flow of the beauty and innocence of childhood. I was suddenly faced with a crash course in growing up. Everything changed. My parents got divorced and I found myself in this new environment that wasn’t as tolerant of mixed race children as Ghana had been… This was in the early 80s. Although I was born in Switzerland, it was a struggle trying to find my way back into this western society.”