A wave of optimism is surging through the South African film industry, inspired by the success of Yesterday, which garnered a foreign Oscar nomination, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, which won top honours at the Berlin Film Festival and Drum, which won the main award at Fespaco, Africa’s biggest film festival, held in Burkina Faso.
For the first time local films are receiving critical attention and our cinema seems poised on the brink of international acceptance.
However, in the last few months the only pure film and television player on the stock market, Sasani, has quietly been selling off assets and is getting ready to close its doors.
While this may allow more competition in the facility and rental business servicing the industry, it does knock down one of the major pillars on which South Africa was marketed internationally as a viable filmmaking destination.
When the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), Cape Film Commission and the Gauteng Film Office began selling South Africa as a location for foreign films, Sasani’s capacity to offer a complete package from camera and lighting rental, laboratory services, studios and post-production solutions was an important part of the sales pitch.
Rand strength has been detrimental to many sectors of our economy and film has not escaped the damage. Already Sasani Studios at the Waterfront, Chris Fellows Sound Studios, the Video Lab in Jo’burg and the Film Lab in Cape Town have been sold off to Sasani’s long-time competitor, the Refinery.
Chris Fellows Studios and the Film Lab in Cape Town are both valuable assets, giving the Refinery the only Dolby Digital licensed sound-mixing facility in the country and a front end negative-processing lab in Cape Town.
Over the last six months the amount of film negative being processed in South Africa has shown a precipitous fall. Sasani’s own numbers indicate a 32% drop nationally in the amount of negative processed at its facilities from feature film shoots.
Film negative processed from commercials is also down 11%. While this has a lot to do with rand strength keeping foreign shoots away, new digital video technology is also nibbling away at the pie.
Local feature films and commercials may no longer require all laboratory services as they opt for the digital film route, but large Hollywood- scale budgets that the country hopes to attract still require the full-service facility. If South Africa loses this capacity it will hurt the “one-stop-shop” selling point to lure big international budgets to the massive new infrastructural investments in DreamWorld Studios in Cape Town and the Durban Film Studio initiative.
Government schemes offering incentives for producers to make films in South Africa has been the main developmental strategy for the local film industry over the past 10 years.
However, if there is any lesson to be learnt from the demise of Sasani, it would seem that favouring international films over local productions is not the best way to build a sustainable film industry.
One can only hope that, at a time when local films are garnering important critical attention, there is an increased flow of funding and support for South African filmmakers instead.
Kenneth Kaplan is a guest lecturer in the television department of the Wits School of Arts and directed the feature film Pure Blood in 1999