20 bizarre movie posters from Africa that make you want to cry and laugh

In the 80-90s, African artists were instructed to make posters for Hollywood films as exciting as possible, regardless of the plot. In addition, it is worth noting that they created ads for films that they had never seen. These images were supposed to facilitate the sale of tickets to movie theaters, so if the film was interesting, then the promotional poster for it should have been simply stunning (creepy scenes and rivers of blood were welcome).

Probably most of these hand-drawn pictures were released in Ghana. "World cinema is the lingua franca that we all understand."- says Los Angeles art dealer and collector Ernie Wolfe. He was the first to notice these unusual movie posters while traveling around the country in 1990. "These posters attract people because they show truly incredible dialogue - a comparison of what you know about the film and how the artist imagined it."

During the military dictatorships of the 70-80s, restrictive laws on the import of large-format offset printing machines, which were used to make posters all over the world, were in force. Therefore, in Ghana of those times, most posters and other signs were created manually.

However, the political climate has changed, and handmade posters are outdated. And collectors from the West showed interest in samples from the past. Today, the price of some rare specimens reaches $ 15,000.