Whether it’s buying or selling, Sithengi is the place for film-makers or wannabes. Andrew Worsdale report
The biggest film industry gathering on the continent forges into its third year next week, and with the arrival on the stock exchange of major players like Primedia and African Media Entertainment (AME), it seems that this year’s Southern African Film and Television Market will exceed all expectations.
Managing director of Sithengi – the word means “marketplace” – Richard Ishmael, says: “My personal wish is to unleash the human and creative endeavours that have been stifled in this political economy for the last 50 or so years.” Then he adds, “I’m not running a gravy train organisation; everyone on my team is seriously committed to getting a Southern African film industry on the go.”
The market expects over 1 500 delegates this year and the event is packed with seminars, pitching sessions and screenings, not to mention the plethora of stands at the Rand Easter Show-type set-up at the new Sasani studios at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. David Dison of AME says, “We promised the market we’d make films and we are (the production company is busy on post-production with Neal Sundstrom’s Inside Out, a comedy written by Gilda Blacher), and we believe that South Africa is poised to be a major point in film production. Without industry-wide efforts and the industry and individual players putting aside their petty differences, we won’t have the dynamic environment everyone’s dreaming about.”
Much of the aim of the market is to engender that camaraderie between film-makers. Many in the industry have complained about the past two years, thinking there weren’t enough major players (that is, Hollywood studios) present. Many have also expressed their dissatisfaction that no deals were made.
Roberta Durrant, of prolific production company Penguin Films, reported candidly, “I’d like to be very positive about this market, but I’m not sure what has come out of it actually. What co-productions have actually been done?” Last year, Canada and South Africa signed a co-production deal and true enough there have been few, if any, results.
Nevertheless, with the government pumping R20-million into the local industry over the past two years, the arrival of a new free-to- air channel e.tv and the IBA’s regulation of local content, there’s a load of prospects for local film and TV production. And Cape Town is Africa’s only major film market next to Tunisia’s Carthage. Zimbabwe has a fledgling film festival, but no market. The Tunisian market is very Arabaphone, so there’s a clear need for a film market for sub-Saharan African countries.
But the point is that visitors shouldn’t expect to cut a deal immediately. The clue is to talk with your contacts before the market, and use the opportunity of the event to meet flesh to flesh, consolidate your contacts and whatever work you’re doing together. This year Sithengi is expecting over 1 500 delegates and has a mass of events to digest. MIPCOM, the international film and television market held in Cannes every year, has upwards of 10 000 delegates, but that’s Europe.
For the uninitiated, here is the manner in which film deals happen at a market place like Sithengi: the most important thing for filmmakers with good ideas is to follow up on positive leads. Very few deals are signed at film markets – so, for those with ambition, the trick is to create visibility and then continue bugging contacts. Directly after Sithengi there are major film festivals/markets in Cairo, London, Rotterdam and Berlin – if punters have the bucks they should keep up the continuity and earn frequent flyer miles.
Besides the market, which has over 50 stands ranging from M-Net to independent filmmakers, the week is sprawling with events. This includes the first international public television conference in South Africa- dubbed African Mini Input.
For one week delegates will be able to consult with much sought-after producers, directors, commissioning editors and programmers from around the world, in open brain-storming sessions.
Various discussions are being held and subjects include African Television Programming, Violence on Television, Educational Film Production and International Programming in Local Perspectives. Input has been a forum about public television for 20 years held in different cities throughout the world, from Guadalajara to Stockholm. If this year’s baby Input succeeds in Cape Town, hopes are that the city will host a full version of the conference in 2001.
The co-production market held up by Gina BonMarriage, a South African-born and Luxembourg-based film producer, aims to explore private sector investment opportunities for film and television. Papers will be presented by the Department of Arts and Culture, Trade and Industry as well as the Department of Finance among others. One of the topics in the programme refers to The South African Film Rand – interesting stuff.
Then there’s the Newcomers Competition – the second time this cash competition has been held at the market. This year 31 entries will be vying for the prize competing with films that have films that have already been broadcast, like Luiz de Barros’ award-wining Death and Zola Maseko’s The Life and Times of Sara Baartman.
Sithengi includes a panoply of seminars and panel discussions, with topics ranging from the questions of copyright, wildlife programming, European and African trade agreements, children’s programming in Africa, regional co-production, and a report back on the film finance and investment workshop which takes place at the market on November 16. The co-production market is also once again hosting a pitching forum. Over 25 filmmakers will present their ideas for movies or TV programmes to a panel made up of European and local broadcasters. The movie makers submitted their proposals in September and were selected.
The pitches are designed in forum style with potential executive producers all pitched to at once, then later one-to-one meetings can be arranged.
If all the schmoozing gets too much, delegates can chill out, watching new releases in the section called the International Director’s Week.
The selection of films this year is decidedly African, and the organisers say that their intention has been to expose local filmmakers to the kinds of films either made in the region or in circumstances similar to ones faced by South Africans. There are eight features on show as well as two shorts representing the Cape Short Films Project. My pick of the flicks is Chickin Bizniz – The Whole Story which opens the programme with its world premiere on Tuesday November 17 at 7.30pm.
This is an expanded version of the Mututuzeli Matshoba story which was originally made for the New Directions series of short films. Matshoba evidently felt that he hadn’t explored the full confines of the original story. This time around he has the narrative beginning in the stock exchange where the hero, Sipho, decides to resign after working for 25 years in order to enter the informal sector where, by selling live chickens as a hawker he hopes to be able to return to the stock market as an investor.
But he faces competition and is undone by his own vanity, which leads to an extra-marital affair. Fats Bhukulwane is marvellous as Sipho (in the short he was played by Ramalao Makhene) and the movie, the feature directorial debut by Wits film lecturer and former Fulbright scholar, Ntshaveni Wa Luruli, is filled with rambunctious humour balanced against a grim sense of social realism. So nice to see a real South African comedy with no candid camera jokes.
Then there’s the stunning Slam, a gritty American movie that’s a startling mix of documentary and drama. Saul Williams and Sonja John are well-known internationally as rap poets and in the movie they play two of the same. He is a well-known poet and petty thief in the ghettos of Washington DC, but when he leaves the scene of a shooting and is imprisoned for possession of soft drugs, his easy-going life-style comes to an abrupt stop.
Many of the inmates are played by real-life prisoners, and the movie is a startling mix of the real and the imaginary.
Add to this feast a tribute to the “griot” of filmmakers Djibril Diop Mambety, possibly the greatest visionary African filmmaker, and you have one of the finest film occasions held in Southern Africa to date. Reason enough for local wannabes to be tripping over each other – chasing the rainbow for that pot of gold.