Doug Fishbone – Elmina

Doug Fishbone often uses humour to explore consumer culture, the mass media, and the relativity and of perception and understanding in a critical and disarming way. Elmina, Fishbone's new feature-length melodramatic film, explores these topics from a radical new direction, presenting an unusual experiment in collaboration and co-authorship. Shot entirely on location in Ghana, Elmina was scripted and filmed by Revele Films, a leading Ghanaian production company, with a cast of major Ghanaian celebrities.

The only intervention on the artist's part is the insertion of Fishbone, a white American, in the lead role. Through this simple gesture of using a racially and culturally incongruous actor, Fishbone tests the viewers' preconceptions of how we interact with cinema and fiction, pushing what audiences expect as the acceptable limits of role and representation in film.

Elmina brings together two cultural economies that normally have little overlap – the Western art world, and the West African popular film industry. What allows the film to cross over between the two is Fishbone's unexplained presence in the lead role of a domestically produced African feature – a white Jewish man from New York playing a role that would normally be played by a black West African actor. No reference is ever made to this oddity of casting, which in a quietly subversive way overturns conventions of race and representation in film, and offers a new perspective on globalization, neo-colonialism, celebrity, and the relativity of audience engagement.

The project is made more provocative by the strategy surrounding its release. Made with the support of three collectors who acted as Executive Producers, Elmina is available as a low-cost mass-market DVD throughout West Africa and African immigrant markets, as well as a limited edition in the art world. As such, the film challenges the way art film is normally financed, collected and distributed, and defies one singular reading or identity.

Elmina was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011.