The Zimbabwe International Film Festival has often been the shining beacon, in the midst of a struggling film industry. While the Zimbabwean music space boasts of countless festivals, the film industry is still catching up. It is still on the outside looking in when it comes to the Zimbabwean entertainment space. Although Zimbabwean filmmakers are shining on the international stage, they still haven’t had that level of platform at home.
It should be said it’s not for a lack trying. The big screen moments at local might be painfully few but however there seems to be an updrift. After the struggle with funding in 2019 and the covid pandemic lockdowns in 2020, the Zimbabwe International Film Festival seems to now finally be on firm ground. They’re building a run of successful editions, and Rudo Chakanyuka has been a part of steering the ship in the last 2 years.
Rudo Chakanyuka hasn’t been with ZIFFT (Zimbabwe International Film Festival Trust) long but she fully embraces her role and sees the festival for what it can be. She comes alive when she talks about Zimbabwean film and won’t let up until all angles to the conversation are exhausted. Here’s how our conversation on the festival and Zimbabwean film went:
As organisers how did you feel about the 2022 festival in terms of your preparedness?
I feel we could’ve prepared better definitely, we could’ve done with more resources financially, we could’ve done with more partners coming onboard to bring other services that we felt we lacked. Our expectations were very high when we started out preparing for the festival.
We got a lot of promises and pledges but as we got closer to the festival reality hit and the economy was doing it’s thing. We got less support than we expected and a lot of people didn’t pull out but weren’t able to deliver on the things they expected to be able to put in. So it turned out to be a lot harder than we expected it to be.
Comparing with 2021 how was the response to the call for submissions?
The 2021 theme was owning our stories and it was in line with the narratives from Zimbabwe, and projects that we were working on then. But in 2022 we just opened the call on film freeway without too much limitation so the response has been very overwhelming. We didn’t have a submission fee as well so just anybody and everybody, including the chancers sent in their films. We had over 3,000 submissions which was a lot, even for us to go through. So that actually made the process very difficult because we’re a small team.
But the competitions though the Hi-5 and the short film competition, the wasn’t very good. I guess it’s because we launched the competitions maybe late, and too close to the festival itself. So people may not have had enough time to make their films and submit them. But then of course that was part of the catch. To ask them to create these works in a short space of time. In fact next year or in the future, it’s going to be like one of those make a film in 48 hours challenges.
Do you feel the local film industry has bounced back enough from the Covid pandemic?
I think it has, because they’re a lot more productions being made, now that people are able to travel again and move around freely with less restrictions. In terms of funding and finances, it’s maybe that we’re now worse off because a lot of funding has now been taken away from the arts and so on. It’s now been channeled towards healthcare and the pandemic, you know disaster relief sort of things and film & arts don’t take as much priority. We’ve bounced back as individuals but as an industry not so much.
Do you feel local filmmakers are doing enough to tell authentic Zimbabwean stories?
I think we are, I think there’s definitely a move towards telling our stories our way. It’s one of the topics that comes up over and over again. Telling our stories our way and not trying to be too much like Hollywood or Nollywood or copying other people’s style. Finding our own voice. So as ZIFFT we actually had one of our forum discussions on that, what is the Zimbabwean story and storytelling from the Zimbabwean perspective.
So it’s something people are looking into, something that the local filmmakers are aware of, more than before. We’re learning from stuff like Squid Games. People here are also thinking if that model works then we should be able to tell a Zimbabwean story and it’s loved everywhere. So definitely we’re gravitating more to telling Zimbabwean stories in our own indigenous languages because there’s an appetite for content from Africa by Africans based here and in the diaspora.
In terms of International productions, did the festival cross borders enough in terms of the films it showcased and the discussions it hosted?
Well the call for films on film freeway brought us films from all over the world. That made our selection process quite difficult as I mentioned earlier. But we did try to have a representation of more countries around the world and more of the less seen content. We had a documentary from Jamaica, we put in a film from Belgium, we had films from Italy. So we didn’t go for the typical, the cliché, big Hollywood films and so forth. Although we couldn’t have as many as we hoped because it was a short festival only 4 days and we tried to focus more on local and African productions.
We had the career day on day 2 were we then had the Russian embassy coming in to discuss studying film in Russia, which is not a typical film study destination for a lot of Zimbabweans. Everyone typically wants to go to South Africa or New York or San Francisco. But we actually tried to bring in a different perspective or a different angle, a different option that’s available out there.
The American embassy also came in to talk about the film that they had brought. We also had UNICEF, they brought in a film about child marriages and they were seeking to raise awareness on the issue. But we lacked funding to physically bring international guests for these conversations so it was restricted to conferencing and we ended up just having more locally focused conversations.
From the festival’s previous struggles what were some of the hardest obstacles in bringing together the 2022 edition?
Funding. It’s always going to be funding. There wasn’t enough funding. In the past you would have more support from the embassies like the European embassy but they now have the EU festival and their funding is now diverted there. The lack of funding also translated into not having a big enough professional team, we relied a lot on volunteers. We however did good in terms of marketing and getting word out there. I think we had a good radio partner.
Are corporates and financial institutions doing enough to meet filmmakers halfway in terms of funding for projects?
Not yet and I think we have a long way to go. We tried to bring the 2 parties together, the filmmakers and the corporates but that in itself was difficult. We tried to set up a Trade Day, on the first day of the festival. We wanted to have had it almost being like how your Agricultural Show or Bridal Expo is, with all the people who are potential players in that industry coming together.
We wanted to have a bank there to sit and talk to the filmmakers. To come up with maybe finance models/loan facilities for the local film industry that actually work. You currently can’t walk into a bank and get a loan for a film like someone with a mining concession or in agriculture. It was one of the things we tried to do but we didn’t succeed as much as we would’ve liked.
