The Big Ticket

There was talk early this year of Hollywood A-lister Idris Elba looking to build a major movie studio in Tanzania. More homegrown filmmakers and professionals are also working to create new paradigm shifts and give the African film industry the boost and blockbuster attention it deserves.

- Inaara Gangji

The experience of every filmmaker in Africa is creating stories from the ground up, immersing themselves in the communities they are in, telling stories and working laboriously with crew who only have the conviction of their art to keep going. Most times, you are on a tight budget and with limited infrasructure, but you make it work and try and get on to the festival circuit too. But grants are limited and so also distribution networks. Such is the story of the film industry in most parts of the continent, despite the zeal and enthusiasm from creatives, as well as their supporters abroad.

For renowned Tanzanian filmmaker, Amil Shivji, these issues hit close to home.

While he has been able to make significant progress on multiple big movies locally, he often had to outsource editing to a different country, for instance, or struggle with the infrastructure and crew available. And for the students he teaches at the University of Dar es Salaam, making a film of festival-caliber seems like a distant dream-at least for now.

"Our students don't have access to equipment, they have to do a lot of theory and are unable to get production experience the markets are the ones that dictate the kind of content that's coming out," Shivji rues. "But the markets are dependent on the infrastructure as well...we are losing out on making original productions and telling our own stories."

There is funding for filmmaking and infrastructure-building coming in especially from the NGO sector, but they have agendas that do not always give filmmakers the flexibility to tell their own stories, he adds.