From Oman to Ghana: A cinematic safari (The Naked City)

When you are kidnapped and successfully rescued as a young seven year old Australian expat in Oman, it seems a strange transition to running a cult video store in Brisbane much later in life. Even more so when you travel to the Philippines in search of the remarkable, two-foot-nine James Bond style movie star Weng Weng. Add to this a current project to make an ultra-low budget feature with prolific Ghanian director Samuel K. Nkansah and you have the extraordinary globe trotting adventures of gonzo filmmaker Andrew Leavold.

Growing up in the Middle East, Andrew remembers that the pickings were slim film-wise. However he fondly recalls the time:

“Betamax hit Bahrain in 1979 and I went bananas, watching everything from war films and spaghetti westerns to the Carry Ons. But my biggest love was horror – the more offensive to my parents the better. I guess I gravitated towards its wrongness and otherworldliness. Later obsessions were the psychotronic stuff like biker films, blaxploitation, dwarfsploitation etc. Almost five decades on I’m still in the cultural gutter, wallowing in the filth – and making a career out of it!”

In 1995 Andrew started a video shop, Trash Video, in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane after working a job at Social Security. A mecca for cult movie fans it specialized in essentially anything strange and obscure. After fifteen years he recalls: “Trash sent me broke and finally closed – I’d spent fifteen years collecting, renting out, watching and discussing every kind of movie imaginable.”

Whilst he had no success with making his own B grade shorts and features, documentaries beckoned and one exceptional movie star stood out – Weng Weng. It was an ‘eighth generation’ VHS bootleg of ‘For Your Height Only’ that introduced him to the diminutive Filipino action hero Agent OO – a two-foot-nine ladies’ man and karate expert, who could kick a goon in the balls then run between his legs. It changed for him forever!  As he explains:

“I decided to find Weng Weng’s story, no matter what. At that point I didn’t know what his real name was or whether he was alive or dead. Then in 2006 I was invited to a Manila film festival to screen a cut-up of Filipino B movies. I decided to take a video camera and track down every person who ever knew or worked with Weng Weng.”

The adventure even included Andrew meeting and interviewing the infamous Imelda Marcos and riding around in her bulletproof limo. When he found himself at Weng Weng’s grave with his only surviving brother, he knew he had an exceptional story. By 2013 he had finished an acclaimed documentary, ‘The Search For Weng Weng’, followed by a book in 2017 – and he still claims to be finding material.

Flash forward to the post pandemic years and an entirely new movie frontier in Ghana,  quickly captured the imagination of Andrew’s inbuilt cinematic wanderlust.

“For me, West Africa is like filmmaking’s WIld West, and Ghana, the poorest cousin of Nigeria’s Nollywood and Uganda’s Wakaliwood, is its furthest frontier. And the King of Kumawood is Samuel ‘Ninja’ Nkansah. He’s made more than a hundred films since 2007 and uploads them on his monetized YouTube channel to fund the next $50 feature.

It didn’t take him long to jump on a plane in 2024, and travel to Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city. Here he not only sought out ‘Ninja’, forging an immediate friendship and even starring as the ‘White Evil’ in one of Ninja’s ultra-low budget epics. The visit became not only the prep to return and shoot his own feature but a documentary on the incredible ‘Kumawood’ phenomenon – ‘Film Safari Ghana – The Chronicles of Ninja”. As Andrew enthuses:

“The plan now is to shoot a feature in Ghana – ‘The Taller They Come’ in which I’ll play the part of an Aussie would-be Tarantino conning his way onto an African film set in an attempt to make a kung fu remake of ‘The Harder They Come’ – with little people! The character’s basically a failed version of me as he even tries to bankroll his movie via Kickstarter (like we’re doing in real life!).”  

Much closer to home he is currently planning a Film Safari to Kings Cross, an area of Sydney already well trodden by many documentary makers. Few if any have dared delve into the Cross’s hidden history of hardcore porn – in particular producers Charis and George Schwartz, makers of the notorious and somewhat legendary ‘Sex Aids And How To Use Them’.

In the meantime you can experience a truly engaging dose of Leavold madness and his unabated enthusiasm for the oddball at the Sydney premiere of ‘Film Safari Ghana – The Chronicles Of Ninja’ at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick on Friday 11th October, 9.00pm. Andrew will introduce the film and host what is always a very entertaining Q&A after.

Check out the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFYSQWe9p8o