Ghanaian actress and Reffa Awards director Selassie Ibrahim says a former Netflix Nigeria executive rejected one of her scripts because it didn’t match his own cultural perspective.
Speaking at the Reffa 2026 Masterclass at Silverbird Cinema, Accra Mall, Ibrahim said the executive suggested after reviewing her script that the story be told from his viewpoint instead. She said she pushed back, arguing that Ghanaian stories need to be told from a Ghanaian perspective to preserve their authenticity, and that reshaping a story to fit another culture’s interpretation risks undermining its originality.
“I’m a Ghanaian, and I’m trying to tell you where I come from,” she said, recalling her response to the executive, and adding that a story failing to resonate with someone else’s culture doesn’t make it wrong.
She also addressed backlash she received after questioning aspects of Nigerian cultural representation, including dressing, in productions depicting Ghanaian stories.
Ibrahim moved to Nigeria in 2013 for its larger entertainment market but said she has kept her Ghanaian identity central to her work, including by speaking Ewe and Twi whenever she appears in Nigerian productions, as a way of preserving her cultural roots.
She called on African creatives to be intentional about protecting their cultural identities even as they pursue collaboration across the continent’s film industry, a theme she has raised before, including past criticism of Ghana’s reliance on Nigerian audiences for online views and a Reffa partnership with Rock Studios to fund Ghanaian-rooted scripts for platforms such as DStv.
