The Zimbabwean film industry (original) (raw)

Does a Zimbabwean film industry exist? The answer is complex. The answer depends on two issues. The first is one's chosen definition of a film industry. The second is the extent of one's knowledge of realities on the ground. This article discusses the state of the Zimbabwean film industry. It argues that the Zimbabwean film industry, like most in Africa, is necessarily a work in progress. Since the country's ‗flag' independence in 1980, the industry has been in a search for itself. A general feature has been the search for ways with which to replace thirty-year old colonial heritages of filmmaking, distribution and exhibition. Initially the industry sought growth through state support, a phenomenon that partially mirrored state support of the Ghanaian film industry under Nkrumah. Part of the state's ambiguous strategy involved growing the industry through marketing the country as a Hollywood set. Financial losses in the mid 1980s, however, caused the state to rapidly retreat from the idea of a state-supported national cinema. This withdrawal coincided with the imposition of World Bank sponsored austerity measures known as Structural Adjustment Programmes. The Zimbabwean film industry has been an orphan ever since. For about a decade, starting in the 1990s, the orphaned industry found a foster-mother in western-sponsored NGOs which used the film industry as a chalkboard to teach message-heavy morality films. The project to take back agricultural land from whites that started in the early 2000s, followed by the collapse of the Zimbabwean dollar, marked the end of a decade-old dominance of the NGO-film in Zimbabwe. The end of the NGO-film paved way for the current state of affairs which can be described as a three-layered coexistence. Middling state and NGO support of the film industry, on the one hand, co-exists with increasingly confident independent filmmaking clusters, on the other hand. Cheaper cameras and editing equipment, added to a nascent straight-to-DVD model somewhat mirroring the production of Bongo films in Tanzania and those of Nollywood, have seen the Zimbabwean film industry emerge anew in a digitally-based third coming. What was traditionally a minority activity is now open to broader participation. The future, though, remains an unknown x. Private investors are still reluctant to invest in the film industry. Funding, distribution and profitability are still sore points. Nevertheless, for the first time, what seem like true foundations are being laid.