Senegal’s movie business, home of some of the continent’s first black filmmakers, is in the throes of crisis with cinema theatres downing shutters as cheap and mostly pirated DVDs flood the markets.
Many cinema halls have been turned into warehouses for anything from spare car parts to cheap, imported Chinese trinkets hawked daily on the streets in Dakar. Others are rented on Sundays by Pentecostal churches led mainly by Nigerian nationals trying to make inroads in this predominantly Muslim country.
”People no longer come to the cinema,” said projectionist Amadou Mamadou Ly, who works in Dakar’s Liberte movie theatre, one of the five remaining halls in the seaside capital.
”The DVDs have had an impact and the poor state of the halls” also puts off movie-goers, he said. ”A football match shown on a giant screen attracts more people than a movie.”
The same ”movie” crisis is seen across Africa, but is all the more surprising in this country that produced one of the continent’s leading filmmakers, Sembene Ousmane, who died recently.
Movie-goers
The Senegalese were avid movie-goers with a taste for American cowboy films, Bollywood fare and cinema from France, the former colonial power whose language is still the official tongue in this West African state.
The country had 78 movie houses at the start of the 1980s but now only 18 remain, according to the Ministry of Culture. Many of these are decrepit, with broken seats, falling roof panels and situated in areas that have gone down hill.
Twenty years ago, the seaside capital, Dakar, had 40 film theatres.
Cinema halls have been closing across Africa for similar regions with the notable exceptions of South Africa and Nigeria, which have booming national film industries, according to the Continental monthly magazine.
”African film is in crisis and the closure of cinemas is only the most visible sign,” it said in an edition published during Africa’s premier film festival, Fespaco, held in Burkina Faso early this year.
In further signs of the worsening crisis, Dakar’s most celebrated movie house, the Paris, located near the central Independence Square, was demolished two years ago. A hotel and cinema complex are reportedly supposed to be built on the site, but construction has not started yet.
The El Mansour movie hall in the working-class suburb of Grand-Dakar is now a garbage dump.
Vendors of pirated DVD films are, meanwhile, laughing all the way to the bank selling each film for about $4 or renting them out for $1 for two days. Most of the pirated movies are foreign and the country’s film industry has also felt the repercussions.
No more backing
Senegal produced some of Africa’s leading filmmakers such as Ousmane, considered to be a ”lighthouse” of African cinema. But its film sector, which received generous state support from the government during the rule of the country’s founding leader, the late Leopold Sedar Senghor, saw that backing start to evaporate when the poet-president retired in 1980.
The state now issues between 60 and 70 filming permits every year and more than half this number of films are actually produced.
”But these films (short and long features and documentaries) are screened more outside the country,” according to the director of cinematography in the Culture Ministry, Amadou Tidiane Niagane.
After receiving state backing in the post-independence 1970s, producers, directors and distributors have largely had to fend for themselves since the 1990s, when the government cut funding due to pressure from global lenders.
”We were misled by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which recommended privatisation of the cinema,” in the 1980s, said the president of the association of Senegalese scriptwriters, Sheik Ngaido Ba. ”It is the worst privatisation we have ever seen in Senegal.”
With little funding, few to no cinema schools and a poverty-struck public, African filmmakers now have to look abroad for support. A €4,5-million fund promised to the film industry early this year in the form of a grant has yet to materialise. — Sapa-AFP