Picture a film screening in the hills of Berekuso, an hour north of Accra. The evening rain has just passed. The audience sits in a planted amphitheatre open to the sky, on terraces that step 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, and one of the most complete statements yet of what this series keeps finding across the continent. The future of African building keeps arriving through its past.
A Cinema for a Scattered Heritage
African cinema has a homelessness problem. The continent produced towering filmmakers, from Ousmane Sembène in Senegal to the generations that built the FESPACO festival in Ouagadougou into the largest celebration of African film on Earth. Yet the physical legacy of that work, the reels and negatives themselves, sits largely in archives, laboratories, and private collections in Europe and beyond, a leftover of the colonial-era infrastructure through which so 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 runs past preservation into production, 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. Four buildings arranged around a central open courtyard, the classic form of the Asante compound. For centuries, the Asante Empire organized its homes, its shrines, and its royal spaces this way, four earthen structures facing a shared court where the real life of the household unfolded. Cooking, judgment, celebration, and mourning all 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, the last standing witnesses of an architecture the British wars against the Asante largely burned away.
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, private rooms in service of a shared centre. A cinema is the same idea wearing modern clothes. 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 it was never a metaphor. Both are machines for gathering.
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 and training a generation of artisans in the craft. If you encounter a finely built rammed earth structure anywhere in Africa today, the odds are good that Ghanaian hands or Ghanaian training touched it somewhere along the line. The Falcon plants its flag firmly in that movement.
The climate logic runs through every drawing. Earth materials throughout give the buildings thermal mass against the Ghanaian heat. A thatched palm-leaf roof assembly is designed to shed rainwater toward the planted courtyard while letting hot air escape, cooling the complex without any mechanical system. A covered walkway rings the court so that even in the rainy season people can circulate dry. The main cinema is the open-air amphitheatre itself, planted so that rain drains into living ground rather than pooling on pavement, and the designers intend to fold construction waste back into the terraced seating landscape rather than hauling it away. Little is sealed, little is wasted, and the building asks the climate to help run it.
When the Credits Roll
Across this series, a pattern keeps sharpening. A desert villa learned from a weaver's nest. A revolutionary was laid to rest in the laterite he preached. A European institution asked to be 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, 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. The stories belong here. The archive belongs here. The audience was always here.
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. It will be the oldest one Ghana knows. Gather in the courtyard. The evening's tale is about us.
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.
