At least every year over the past 13 years, Zanzibar has been hosting the famous Zanzibar International Film Festival. Over the years I have been attending such an important festival for both film audience from around the world and most importantly film directors from dhow countries and globe at large. Well I couldn’t help it doing so this time around as well. Reading the ZIFF program, my first glance was on the message from this festival director, Prof. Martin Mhando. Some of it reads “At ZIFF we act as a vehicle for art and the union of image and sound in film is one of the most powerful art forms we have today. We provide a space to show the amazing, beautiful and stimulating works from Africa and beyond so they can be honored and be given the due time and reflection they deserve”. That’s exactly what the 13th ZIFF screened films were, they were amazing and beautiful to watch and stimulated both the souls and minds of the film audience who were gathered to watch them. During ZIFF such films do walk away with awards and prizes and people who collected them are the directors of the films. Their happiness and appreciations didn’t end up when they were receiving their symbols of winning but the day after they were invited for a press conference and this is where I collected from them what I call brainwaves and insights about filmmaking but most noticeably why and how should we be making films.
The following is the presentation, with a little bit of commentary added, of the ZIFF after awards night press conference attended by some of the winning films directors. Starting with Ndoto za Elibidi (75min) by Nick Reding and Kamau Wa Ndugu that walked away with four awards from different awards categories. The film was devised originally as a stage play with actors from the Nairobi slums. This Swahili story pivots around the theme of acceptance and love as its colorful protagonists – parents, where by George has a dream of seeing his four daughters getting good jobs and prospering but the dream is becoming illusory as both members of the family and their lovers come to terms with HIV and ghetto life.
The directors were able to verify what the motives for their making of such a brilliant film were. According to Kamau Wa Ndugu, they were predictive that the film will bring hope to people living in slums (Madhare, Nairobi Kenya) as well as motivate them. Ndoto za Elibidi was running for five years in the slums (Under SAFE project) therefore it’s likely that they had about fiove years of pre – production. One peculiar and innovatively far-fetched aspect about Ndoto za Elibidi is that audiences in the slums are introduced as third characters of the film and are therefore seen reacting to the play. However what is far more important one should is the moral statement of the film and the moral duty that the two directors were able to attend to.
A word of inspiration for younger and growing filmmakers that Nick Reding was able to give was that it’s not easy to make films, just persevere and keep going, we have seen really interesting and good young filmmakers here and I think there are a lot of talents in East Africa. Mean while Kamau Wa Ndugu had this words …patient pays, we have been very patient with this film, we have been wanting to shoot for the last five years but we didn’t have any money and we decided to just wait and finally we have a film.
Motherland (118 min) by Owen Alik Shahadah,walked away with an award for a best documentary film is a bold, epic documentary that fuses history, culture and politics to tell a new dynamic story of a continent. This fascinating narrative unfolds with interviews from Meles Zenawi, Jacob Zuma, Ali Mazuri and Harry Belafonte. According to Owen Alik (Producer/Director) “Motherland is a concise overview of thirty thousand years of African history, starting with our first civilization in the Nile Valley, Ancient Egypt and charting the course of African history which is slavery, colonization and so forth to the contemporary moment dealing with the issues that continent face, success stories in the African continent. Well motherland is actually about “the motherland” which is Africa to most of the blacks living in the different parts of the world, said Owen Alik. The film is a very intellectual vigorous film telling a story that demands a lot of research and objectivity. However Owen Alik succeeded to a greater percentage to draw the attention and feelings of the diversified ZIFF audience who had an opportunity to watch the film. Owen Alik agrees that it was easy for him since he is also a scholar in aspects of African history particularly the Arab slave trade, African holocaust and West Africa. “That’s my style, doing academic type of themes” Owen Alik maintained. However the film isn’t dry as one may think due to the fact that it treats the academic theme. The cinematographic aspect of the film creates a visual simulation that makes it appealing to the mind and the eye at the same level of impact.
Despite the bureaucracy over the archived – past information about different stories that we always arrest to be a set back towards the making of profound films with such stories as what “motherland” was able to comprehend, Owen Alik maintains that it was his previous works and the validity of his idea of the film that paved his way through the bureaucracy over the retrival of such archived materials in different archives around Africa. There was a point that people he met along the way were directing him where to go and what should be picked for this documentary film. Lastly Owen maintains that the best person to succeed is the one who prepares. Preparation constitute the bigger part of a production than the filming itself which becomes easy if you have prepared. Owen went on supposing that in the process of making Motherland he had to do a solid research “we sepnd a lot of time preparing for example for the academic part of the film, tones of research papers were visited, history of the Swahili coast, the Zanji in Iraq…it’s a glamour and it’s a lot of work.
My City on Fire (5 min) which was awarded a best short documentary film is a short documentary about the 10th December 2009 – riots in Kampala. People were terrified and rush to their families but not Dennis Onen (Director of the film) who felt the urge to make a video about the riots and he is courageous enough to go out on the streets only to find his city on fire. “Whatever endeavors we are in, though some people may not see it, the rest of the world may see something potential on it that is what makes me strong and gave me the courage and I feel encouraged telling more of the story of African continent” said Dennis Onen. My city on fire is an instinctive film as the director reacted to the situation in Uganda at the time when the Buganda Kingdom and the central government had a conflict that had reached a maximum point and resulted into a war. “I picked my small hand cam and I was like, I need this story, I need to record it, may be one day I will need it but when I went down the road to this (record) I discovered that it was not just a story I wanted to keep but this was a story to tell the rest of the world”. Dennis went on supposing that the main thing I considered was what story I wanted to tell the world; it’s not only the recording (that was coincidental) I made but the story is what inspired me to go on with the making of this film.
My city on fire is Dennis’s personal statement, having experienced seeing his city burning at some point in his life. Dennis agrees that there are facts in our “motherland” that needs to be exposed. Finally Dennis expounds that he is in line with documentary films and he might continue making them and hence he wants to be nicknamed Dennis “The documentarian”, best of luck brother as such is an endeavor.
Pumzi (21 mins) is a science – fiction made in response to the problems we have with water especially the water crisis in Kenya and I reaction to the bottled water. According to the director, Wanuri Kahiu, Pumzi is holding in check the idea behind bottled water as one of the reason that we privatize all our resources. The director believes that it takes more water to make the bottle than to put water in the bottle. Pumzi is also a response to the ill-care that we give to the environment. The film dictated what genre it was going to be, I just followed the story from the beginning to the end” said the Wanuri Kahiu. Thus she didn’t have the idea of what genre this film was going to be as she was initially writing it.
The film is approximately 35 thousands US dollar budget which in reality is hard to seize for a non – profit project but she managed and she didn’t hesitate to expand on the grounds of such expensive grant saying “the first short film that she already made created a portfolio for granters to be convinced that she is an established filmmaker that can stand for the making of a film from the beginning to the end. However she maintains that she is not a proponent of just making films with grants money “I guess that’s not helping the industry in performing and growing, if you are not necessarily accountable on how that money goes into the industry in the end. She went on supposing that it will be great if we could get more of the commercial world, private sections investments to be able to fund films and get a little more government support. She lastly maintains that with every filmmaker, you are only as good as your last film.
Therefore, if I garner from such brainwaves and insights of the 13th ZIFF film directors, I would say the reason why we should be making films is that film supposes a personal, moral and intellectual statement on and about the different life situations and circumstances that we live by on daily and from different wakes of life. It at all, we (filmmakers), on my opinion, we could think of films as text with statements to make, we might put this discipline high on top (than it has already been) of other disciplines that culminates on the same fact that “as we live, we come across the situations and circumstances that demands wisdom to go over them, we therefore need a statement of some meaningful actions of redemption”. Can we provide such statement via this medium, film?
No comments:
Post a Comment