Picture a film screening in the hills of Berekuso, an hour north of Accra. The evening rain has just passed, and the audience sits in a planted amphitheatre open to the sky, on terraces stepping down through greenery inside a courtyard framed by four buildings of rammed red earth. The walls around them were pressed from the same ground the audience walked to get there. On the screen, an African story plays in a place built the African way. For most of the history of cinema on this continent, no such place existed.
This is The Falcon Cinema, designed by Studio NEiDA and commissioned by film curator Jacqueline Nsiah. Design work began in 2024 and completion is expected in 2027. When it opens, it will be a purpose-built cinema and cultural archive dedicated entirely to African film. Its design draws on the architectural traditions of the place where it is being built, giving the archive a physical home rooted in Ghanaian soil.
A Cinema for a Scattered Heritage
African cinema has a homelessness problem. The continent produced towering filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène in Senegal, while generations of filmmakers built the FESPACO festival in Ouagadougou into one of Africa's most important film festivals. Yet much of the physical record of that work, including reels and negatives, ended up in archives, laboratories, and private collections in Europe and beyond, a legacy of the colonial-era systems through which many African films were processed and stored. Many classics have never been screened in the countries that made them. International restoration efforts have spent recent years simply trying to locate the prints.
The Falcon is designed as an answer. Its programme includes a 250-seat and a 150-seat screening room, a restaurant, an education hub, communal spaces, an outdoor cinema, and, at its heart, an archive for African and diasporic film. A second compound is planned for a later phase, with living quarters for filmmakers in residence. The ambition extends from preservation to production, creating a pipeline where the next generation of African filmmakers can study the last one without leaving African soil. A cultural institution of this scale also anchors an economy around itself, drawing scholars, tourists, and steady work to a growing town already home to Ashesi University.
The Compound Remembers
To hold all of this, Studio NEiDA reached for one of West Africa's oldest architectural ideas, the classic Asante compound with four buildings arranged around a central open courtyard. For centuries, the Asante Empire organized its homes, shrines, and royal spaces this way, with four earthen structures facing a shared court where the real life of the household unfolded. Cooking and celebration happened in that open centre, under the sky, in company. The form survives today in the earthen shrine houses near Kumasi that UNESCO lists as World Heritage, some of the few remaining examples of an architectural tradition that suffered extensive destruction during the British wars against the Asante.
The compound was never just a floor plan. As we have written before, African architecture has always carried a philosophy inside its walls, and the compound's philosophy is communal life itself, with private rooms arranged around a shared centre. A cinema follows much the same principle. Strangers gather in one space to watch one story and leave slightly more like a community than they arrived. By drawing the Falcon as a compound, the architects matched the social technology of the Asante household to the social technology of the movie theatre. The fit is perfect because the compound and the cinema both bring people together in a shared space.
Ghana's Quiet Earth Revolution
There is a reason this building is rising in Ghana. Over the past decade the country has become one of the continent's centres of serious earthen construction, with Accra studios pioneering rammed earth walls for homes, offices, and public buildings while training a generation of artisans in the craft. Ghanaian studios and Ghanaian-trained builders have also played a growing role in some of the continent's most ambitious rammed-earth projects. The Falcon is part of that growing movement.
The climate logic runs through every drawing, with earth materials throughout giving the buildings thermal mass against the Ghanaian heat. A thatched palm-leaf roof assembly channels rainwater toward the planted courtyard, while openings allow hot air to escape and cool the complex without mechanical systems. Around the courtyard, a covered walkway keeps circulation dry during the rainy season. The main cinema is the open-air amphitheatre itself, where planted terraces allow rain to drain into the ground rather than collect on pavement. Construction waste is also intended to be worked back into those terraces rather than hauled away.
When the Credits Roll
Across this series, a pattern has become clearer, with a desert villa learning from a weaver's nest, a revolutionary laid to rest in the laterite he preached, and a European institution housed in Senegalese earth. Now Ghana is preparing to house the continent's cinematic memory in the architecture of the Asante household. Each project pushes the same question further along, the question of what it means for Africa to stop performing for approval and start building from its own centre.
Film may be the most powerful answer yet, because film is how a culture sees itself. For decades Africans have watched their own stories in borrowed rooms and on borrowed screens, when they could watch them at all. A cinema whose very walls are pressed from Ghanaian ground says something before the projector even warms up, giving African film a place where its stories and archive belong.
In Berekuso, when the lights dim in 2027 and the first reel turns, the building around the audience will be telling a story of its own. The story begins with the earth beneath it and continues on the screen.
This article is part of Building Africa, an Africa Rebirth series on the continent's architectural traditions and climate-sensitive building solutions for the Africa of today. Based on original reporting by Shav Ngah (@shavnyuyngah). The Falcon Cinema is designed by Studio NEiDA and commissioned by Jacqueline Nsiah, with completion expected in 2027. Renders courtesy of Studio NEiDA.
