A new organisation promises to broaden the
base of film production – and tackle
burning issues – in Southern Africa,
developing links between this country and
others in the region.
Southern African Communications for
Development (Sacod) is a coalition of film
and video production units based in
Southern African countries; that is
Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland,
Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Their aim is to promote and encourage
film-makers in the region to actively
engage in the social and political issues
in their countries using film and video as
a means of intervention and debate. Sacod
has been around for 12 years but has
recently gone through major restructuring.
Just three years ago the membership was
limited to six production units in four
countries. Now there are more than 30
members from seven countries and new
applications are received regularly.
Most of Sacod’s funding has come from
Canadian NGO Suco, but it is currently
broadening its funding base to include the
American Open Society Foundation (Soros)
and the South African NGO Interfund, which
administers funds furnished by the Danish
NGO Ibis.
Sacod has more than 140 programmes in
its catalogue and is an active distributor
of these movies to broadcasters in the
region.
Products include the searing three-part
series Landscape of Memory (which aired on
SABC earlier this year), which consists of
Karen Boswell’s From the Ashes that
focuses on three former fighters in
Mozambique’s civil war living in a small
village on the island of Ihla Josina,
Zimbabwe-based Prudence Uriri’s Soul in
Torment that looks at members of the
country’s Fifth Brigade, and The Unfolding
of Sky by South Africans Antjie Krog and
Ronelle Loots in which Krog, who reported
on the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, has a dialogue with Debra
Matshoba, who testified at the commission.
Sacod has a highly effective method of
alternative screening initiatives, such as
mobile television vans and cinemas. Mobile
units have been operating well in Lesotho
and Swaziland and pilot projects have been
supported in Zimbabwe. Sacod is setting up
further supporting mobile units in Zambia,
Namibia and Mozambique.
Sacod chair David Max Brown says: “I’ve
always wanted to create work for myself
that would benefit the audiences, rather
than the one-off “entertainment” aspect of
making documentaries for armchair potatoes
watching Channel 4 in the United Kingdom.
“My driving force and I believe that of
most Sacod members is to make programmes
that really work, that motivate audiences,
that change people’s lives, change being
the driving word.
“We want to develop our skills so that
we are able to invest more and more of our
own interpretation and vision on the blank
canvas of the videotape and create a
product in which the audience is willing
and able to invest their time,
understanding and resultant energy.”
Film-maker and Sacod member Don Edkins
says: “Documentary film-making in Southern
Africa is taking new steps in the post-
apartheid era. Being part of the Sacod
network is one way to develop film-making
skills in the region, and to find ways of
reaching audiences who still lack access
to media.”
Many of the documentaries in the
apartheid era were dry and at times
didactic pieces that were overtly
political and frequently played more often
overseas than locally. But since 1994
things on the South African documentary
front have changed radically.
With the opening up of the SABC and the
arrival of free-to-air channel e.tv,
increasingly local documentary films seem
to be getting more creative, more hard-
hitting, reflexive and at times almost
avant-garde (for example the funky inserts
on SABC3’s Artworks and its successor The
Works).
Times have changed and the South African
documentary industry is thriving with new
talent and a real sense of purpose. Trevor
Steele Taylor, the country’s leading film
festival programmer, says: “The [local]
documentary film-makers who are recognised
are stylistically very television-based,
coming as so many of them have out of
struggle documentary. There is a tendency
towards giving instruction without the
poetry of the best documentaries, such as
those by Humphrey Jennings and Chris
Marker – but some newly made films are
transcending this lack of style, including
Jo’burg Stories, Henion Han’s Letter to My
Cousin in China and Ian Kerkhof’s Baby
Kain.”
Sacod will hold its annual forum from
the October 23 to 29 in Windhoek, Namibia
on the theme “Race, Gender and Cultural
Identity”. The forum is a meeting place
where film-makers, distributors and
related organisations gather to screen and
debate selected films and videos with the
objective of enabling directors to make
more effective programming that will be
better tools for social change – with the
specific aim of making programmes that
motivate and stimulate audiences to take
action in a personal or organised way.
There will be two days of intense
sessions with a one-day break for
networking and informal discussions,
followed by two more days of sessions.
During the forum the participants view
selected programmes and then discuss and
listen to presentations from invited
specialists, exchange experiences and
establish new contacts. There is also a
video bar, where small groups view
particular films that members may bring to
the forum.
The forum’s atmosphere is non-
competitive and constructive. In order to
maintain this Sacod does not invite
commissioning editors from local or
international TV stations and limits NGO
participation to those NGOs who are
actively involved in film or video
production but who are not themselves in
the business of commissioning programmes.
Sacod is expecting about 60 people to
attend and are currently calling for
entries from film-makers who are asked to
submit any number of programmes of any
length and genre that were produced after
January 1998.
The deadline for entries is July 20.
Entry forms can be downloaded from
www.sacod.org.za or you can phone (011) 403 8416