She burst onto the Ghanaian movie scene described as one who “seeks to raise the standard of film production in Ghana and Africa by telling progressive African stories as seen through the eyes of Africans.” And with The Perfect Picture, released in 2009, Shirley Frimpong-Manso won Best Director at the 2010 African Movie Academy Awards, where her films garnered a total of four awards. The prolific film director, writer, and producer, and Founder/CEO of Sparrow Productions – a film, television and advertising production company – has gone on to release about a dozen movies, many of them winning various awards including; A Sting in a Tale, a cautionary tale about two Ghanaian men scrabbling to find jobs. It won an Audience Favourite award at the 2010 Pan African Film & Arts Festival.
Adams Apples: a 10-part serial released during one year, starting in April 2011, follows the lives of four women (a mother and three adult children) in modern Ghana. And in 2014 alone, Shirley released three movies; Devil in the Detail, Love or Something Like That, and V-Republic. Shirley has racked up an impressive number of awards for her work, including at The 6th Africa Movie Academy Awards – Best Director of the Year and Best Soundtrack for the movie A Sting in a Tale., which incidentally, at the 18th Annual Pan African Film & Arts Festival, also took home the award for Audience Favourite-Narrative Feature. At the 2014 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards, Shirley was adjudged Best Video Editor and Best Movie Director.