African film schools: Growing our talent on native soil

By Alexander Macbeth

If governments have been slow to support the film industry, film-makers themselves are setting up the training structures the next generation needs it's time.We need to mobilise film-makers

African film-makers cut the umbilical cord with Europe. But the absence of national film institutions in many African countries, and of governments willing to finance training and production, means that this is easier said than done.

A situation has arisen where African film is represented by film-makers trained in Europe to make films in European languages, financed by European funds for distribution and recognition at European festivals.

Mahamet-Saleh Haroun, the celebrated Chadian director of Daratt, calls it an "IV drip" that leads to "chronic illness". Yet the illness may not be fatal.

Over the past 10 years, successful film-makers have taken it into their own hands to set up training centres. They range from the established and blossoming Maisha FilmLab in Kampala, Uganda, founded in 2004 by the Indian director Mira Nair, to the young IDF Film School in Sierra Leone, started by the director of the Institut Français, Ahmed Mansaray, who is also an executive producer and director.

In 2005, Gaston Kaboré, the Burkinabe director of Wend Kuuni, opened Institut Imagine in Ouagadougou. It provides advanced training to film-makers, often graduates from the National Film Institute in Jos, Nigeria.

It will work in partnership with Germany's DW Akademie and the Berlinale in 2012 to host workshops for editors, camera operators and directors. Miriam Odaka, programme director at Maisha Film Lab, says securing funding is the not-for-profit organisation's main challenge.

However, the Lab has entered into partnerships with the Göteborg International Film Fund (Sweden), the Danish Film Institute and the Luma Foundation in Arles, France, enabling it to fund screen writing and film-making labs in Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania as well as Uganda.

Its 2012 training programmes are set to reach 124 participants, each of whom will receive a full scholarship. The biennial film festival Fespaco in Burkina Faso presented several of Maisha's in-house projects in 2011, while shorts Rough Boy and Zebu and the Photo Fish picked up awards at South Africa's Auteur Experimental Short FilmFestival.

Such accolades provide a much-needed boost for the East African film industry. The Kilimanjaro Film Institute founded in 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania, offers training to disadvantaged candidates pursuing a career in cinema.

Other film institutes, such as AFDA based in Cape Town and Johannesburg, have gone on to become global leaders in film training. AFDA runs its own annual film festival that showcases students' work every November.

A new African film aesthetic is already in development. But governments have not yet shown how they will address the issues of funding and distribution.

As Chadian director Haroun has written earlier in The Africa Report, "We need to mobilise film-makers to convince our governments to make cinema a national priority."

VivaRiva!, the African blockbuster of 2011 (seebelow), recently secured distribution in a record-breaking 18 African countries, showing African film graduates that they can put African cinema-goers ahead of European festival judges at last.

- "I felt that black did not define me, Africa did"