Challenging the status quo: a feminist reading of Shirley Frimpong-Manso's 'Life and living it'

Across the African continent, research and scholarship has shown that over the years African women filmmakers such as Safi Faye (Senegal), Anne Mungai (Kenya), Flora M'mbugu-Shelling (Tanzania), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Fanta Regina Nacro (Burkina Faso), Anne-Laure Folly (Togo), Ngozi Onwurah (Nigeria), Salem Mekuria (Ethiopia), Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia), Assia Djebar (Algeria), and Wanjiru Kinyanjui (Kenya) have created new cinematic aesthetics and creatively refashioned representations of women within their respective countries. In Ghana, however, the evolution of women's filmmaking merits a great deal more attention than it currently receives in mainstream film scholarship. A number of questions arise in thinking about women filmmakers in Ghana. For example: how have Ghanaian women filmmakers engaged with feminism? To what extent have they explored the trajectories of African feminist ideas in their works? How do they portray women? Do they share any recurring motifs? What challenges have they faced in bringing a wider range of women, their lives and experiences to the screen? These are pressing and valid questions that we are exploring in our work. In this article, however, we offer an African feminist reading of one of Ghana's most successful contemporary filmmakers, Shirley Frimpong-Manso, and analyse how she represents women in her debut commercial film, 'Life and Living It'. We've decided to focus on this film because it foregrounds male characters while adopting a feminist perspective, which sets it apart from many female-themed films that abound in the commercial film industry in West Africa