Although United States actor Morgan Freeman hailed the ”high potential” of the South African film industry at the Sithengi Film and Television Market last week, industry players bemoaned a crippling lack of government funding.
Freeman, who attended Sithengi as part of an American delegation looking at ways to unlock funding and develop the local industry, said South Africa had an ”enormous store of stories to be told”.
”Once you start telling these stories, you will prosper,” said the US star. But judging from the department of arts and culture’s film budget, most of those stories will remain untold.
While the government has increased its allocation for film and video from R24-million in the past financial year to the current R35-million, this provides for less than 5% of what the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) says is needed.
Speaking on the Sithengi sidelines last week, NFVF chief financial officer Karen Son said the government’s R35-million allocation, which is channelled through the foundation, was ”really not enough”.
In the NFVF value charter, it proposed that funding be increased from the R26-million the government originally proposed this financial year to R920-million, but government only managed to add on another R9-million.
”Every year we receive applications that are in excess of what we can fund. We need to see further commitment from the government so we are able to meet the demand,” said Son.
Every year the foundation receives more than 200 applications for film production and development, including a further 300 bursary applications. She said the NFVF was forced to look to the private sector to bridge the funding gap and meet the demands of the country’s film industry.
To put the R35-million into perspective, the Oscar-winning Tsotsi required a budget of R22-million. But, despite the success of Tsotsi and other achievements in the industry, chief director in the department of arts and culture, Lindi Ndebele-Koka, said during Sithengi’s official opening that the government had no additional funding for film production.
The shortage has long frustrated local directors and the need to look elsewhere for money had compromised many great South African movie stories. One is Drum, the story of the late investigative journalist Henry Nxumalo, who worked for the popular magazine of the same name in the 1950s.
The need to source foreign funding meant we had to watch the muscle-bound American Taye Diggs play the part of our local hero. Roy Zetisky, a Cape Town-based executive director and cameraman at Pistoleros Films, who worked with Drum director Zola Maseko, said he is co-directing a feature called A Tin of Paint about the 1952 anti-apartheid uprisings. Probably experiencing a slight sense of déjàvu, Zetisky said they had to look for foreigners to help cough up the R17-million production cost. Despite the best of intentions, there was ”no way the NFVF can fully fund a feature film”, he said, ”because their yearly allocation is almost the cost of one feature film.”
This year’s Sithengi has made some progress as it witnessed the signing of four co-production treaties between Italy, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa, allowing for cross-funding between the signatories, providing production or locations are shared. The agreement does not relieve the paucity of government’s coffers, but does build relationships and ”open up markets for our productions”, said NFVF chief executive officer Eddy Mbalo.
Mbalo said the signing of the treaties had introduced some ”light at the end of the tunnel” as far as partnerships in the film industry were concerned. Sithengi chief executive officer and festival director, Mike Auret, said, while co-production treaties will make it possible for producers to access funding in other countries, ”that does not mean we should not have funding from the state. There is a lot of money floating around, but the government can only give R35-million for film production,” said Auret. — West Cape News