 Y Llywodraeth Cymru arweithio ar y sefydliadau plenariadau arall. Yn y cwestiwn arall y cydwys ystod, yno gweld fanyliedig yw fanyliedig ar eu sefydliadau o fanyliedig yn llwyffbeth yng Nghymru fydd ydw i'r sefydliadau arall yn llwyffbeth yr ystod. y cwm dechreu'r cyd-dweithiau, oedd yn ysgolio'r cyd-dweithiau. Yn ymgyrch o'r cyd-dweithiau, mae'n olygu'r cerddau newydd yna, bobl sy'n dweudio'r cyd-dweithiau, ond arall y cerddau ac yn rhai sy'n cael ei cyd-dweithiau. Mae'r cyd-dweithiau'n cyd-dweithiau yn teimlo i gael cyfnodol i'r cerddau newydd a'r cyd-dweithiau a'r cyd-dweithiau a'r cyd-dweithiau o'r cyd-dweithiau. I see publications and they publish the new African, new African business, African banker, new African woman, Savannah Nightingale, a journalist and analyst at IHS Maritime who's worked for a number of African television stations and Barnaby Phillips from Al Jazeera. They'll be here. Llew Cwesa, who are back from Sky unfortunately, isn't able to join us, but I guarantee you we'll have plenty of time for Q&A then. Fantastic. Now usually when we discuss how Africa is represented in the mass media, we tend to focus on factual programming and current affairs and of course we would because that's what really gets people, it's very immediate and it's usually crisis. When if you check the viewing habits of Africans both here and across Africa, you'll see that homegrown drama, both in TV and film of course, is performing very strongly in some channels here in this country. They outperform the other programs by double or treble, particularly some of the Nollywood variety. And Gallywood, I think the Ghanaian Hollywood is now Gallywood. I don't like Gollywood, Gallywood I call it. So the question is what lies behind this and what kind of image is it projecting to Africans about themselves and to the outside world? What impact are dramas like An African City by Nicol Amatifio having? Are they helping to change the game? Did I say your name wrong? Amatifio, amatifio. Are they helping to change the game? If you haven't seen that drama yet, it was launched last year, or if you need a reminder, then take a look. Welcome home with the African continent finally has you back and just in time for the holidays. Honestly, did you write me a shoot? Nope, I'm here for work contracts, big government contracts, that's it. I just had sex in the bed you share with your wife and you want to pray? Maybe I should set the two of you up. No way. Ha ha, yes way, that's what I'll do. Dramas with big black butts? Why don't you just talk to him? Talk to a white guy about his born collection of black magits. Excuse me, I'm a lawyer, I'm not a therapist. Did you offend a member of parliament? I told some stupid idiots how I felt about them. $5,000 a month. Yes. Is that how you look on your permit? No, daddy. Sugar daddy. My real daddy? My real sugar daddy. Is that guy really peeing in front of us, really? Is that legal? He penises every day unwillingly because they just want to relieve themselves anywhere, everywhere, nasty. It's not dirty, it's been in you. Go get married. Nanaia. Hi, Shagun. How long are you backing down for? I'm back for good. Nanaia, this is my girlfriend, Coqa. That's his girlfriend. Yeah. Guys, I think Shagun is my soulmate. Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted we've got such a lively audience today. I'm going to introduce my panel briefly because you have their full biographies in your leaflets. But I will just say that it's a real honour to have such a distinguished panel. I don't know how often we get this quality of film curators and creators together. So, I will just introduce them briefly for you. So, I will start on my right. We've got Lindiwe, she is a South African academic film festival director and film curator and filmmaker. Next to me is June Giovanni, film curator, archivist and international consultant in African and diaspora cinema with more than 30 years' experience. Next to me, on my left, needs a little introduction. Nicole, the creator of an African city which you just saw. Originally a communication strategist in social media who's now created this unique series which has gone viral since its creation last year. And then on my far left is Keith Cheary, international curator for African cinema and visiting research fellow at the University of Westminster. Those don't even begin to summarise their experience and accomplishments. So, I hope you will look in your leaflets at their full experiences and biographies. So, today we're going to continue the theme of this conference but also with what I hope will be an enlightening shift towards fiction. We're all quite ready, if not before, by now today familiar with the challenges we experience in news. I'm myself a news reporter and I have been a foreign correspondent in Africa despite being an African myself. So, I feel like I know from both perspectives the challenges of reporting facts or you could put that in quotation marks in Africa. But we're going to talk about fiction and whether fictional representations in film have their own challenges, whether they've been able to overcome the colonial legacy that was still so present in news reporting of Africa and what the spectatorship and logistical and financial issues for contemporary filmmakers, for archivists, for film festivals are. So, Lindiwe, I just want to start with a question for you because you've talked a lot about spectatorship experiences in Africa. Where are we in terms of African films? What are the spectatorship issues and what is the legacy of colonialism in African film today? Well, thank you so much Afar and I just want to say I'm so excited to be on this panel because I think it really does pick up really wonderfully from the panel that we had this morning. The American journalist Alan Bath said that the news is only the first rough draft of history and I think this is so important in recognising the power of the news and giving us eyewitness reports but also what our panel is trying to do today is look at the limitations of the news, what the news just can't do as genre and I think fiction has a wonderful potential here to really go into the imagination, to go into uncomfortable places that the news really can't do and tell the positive stories. So I'm a bit of an evangelist for fiction in terms of the positive stories that it can tell as well and just to go back a bit historically first to talk about the production of films, African filmmakers have always been drawing on news stories and then taking the more statistical formulaic approach of the news but going much deeper into the imaginative lives of individuals and African cinema actually starts with this very moment with Ousmane Semben, the great Senegalese filmmaker, reading a tiny little news report in a French newspaper about a woman who'd been taken from Senegal to France to work as a maid and who'd ended up committing suicide in France and that was in the third diverse section of this French newspaper. It would have been thrown away the next day and Semben took this little moment and he turned it into this incredibly powerful fiction film called Black Girl which is the first sub-Saharan feature length film made by a sub-Saharan African and we have this out of that tiny little newspaper report we have this film that is one of the great films in the African cinematic canon and that has also come to your question about spectatorship really changed the principles of spectatorship as well so if African filmmakers have that potential to do that and we're seeing incredible transformations in the ways that spectators are today in Africa are dealing with material I mean again if we look historically at what's gone on you have these colonial film units that I mentioned this morning in the early panel that was set up across the African continent particularly by the British and the Belgian colonizers and these colonial film units were making films specifically for Africans and if you look at the colonial film unit in Nigeria the head of this colonial film unit, William Sellers drew up a whole list of rules about what should be made in films for Africans and one of these rules was leave nothing to the imagination so there was this assumption that Africans were such literal spectators that they wouldn't be able to deal with the imagination now we all know that this is obviously absolutely ridiculous that there is huge imaginative power in Africa but the really frustrating thing is that one still finds contemporary examples of this today where I would say that what gets produced over and over is this kind of relegation of Africa as a literal space rather than imaginative space and this is not just produced by the news genre it's produced through the academy, through development agencies as well and it kind of denies Africa it's imagination which we all know is there in abundance just to give two brief examples Jean-Pierre Becolot, very well known Cameroonian fiction filmmaker who's recently made a film called Le Président which is a very biting critique of Paul Beer's regime in Cameroon he's spoken about how a particular European funding agency has kept coming to him saying don't you want to make a documentary about Rwanda and what happened there now anyone who has seen Becolot's films which are incredibly experimental and engaging would know that Jean-Pierre Becolot does not want to make a documentary about the Rwanda genocide another example would be from, in terms of spectatorship would be the experience of many African filmmakers who go around the festival circuit and in Q&As after their screenings they find that they are repeatedly asked questions about the history, the politics, the anthropology of the countries in which their films are set but these questions have nothing to do with the film that they have actually made this would not happen to an American filmmaker for example they wouldn't start being asked questions about the history and the politics of America if that had nothing to do with the film they made so that's what I'm talking about when I talk about this literal space that Africa gets shoehorned into and why I think that there are such transformative possibilities in the genre and the realm of fiction Thank you, it's really interesting June you've got 30 years of experience I know, well it's so impressive Do you, is what Linda Ywe saying chime with your experience and do you think that in the film that you work with in archive is there a sense that sometimes the literal prioritised over the imaginative or the figurative? Yes, I will respond to that Can I just say thank you I just wanted to pick up on something that that discussion that young man brought up about vaccination and those things I think there's a bigger principle there and I didn't get a chance to say anything at the time and I would suggest that he looks at the film by Raoul Peck called Assistance Motel which is about how international and development agencies deal with issues and situations in certain developing countries and what the result is of a lot of other agendas that go in with that It's a bigger principle than obviously we could deal with in this discussion but I would suggest that you look at that film I think that the issues that we're looking at today on this panel are perennial because 20 years ago this year 20 years ago exactly we had a big conference at the NFT called Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas bringing together lots of African filmmakers critics, writers who came together to actually address a lot of issues about where African cinema was and how it was going to move forward and in fact it's true that the history of Africa didn't begin with slavery and colonisation but as you've pointed out around the time that Sam Ben was making films Africa was becoming a lot of African countries were gaining independence Africa was becoming independent there were discussions around how Africa will define its future and the role of culture and film within that and I say this at this juncture in 2015 20 years later because I believe that questions of audience questions of finance still relate back to who is setting the agenda what is the agenda and where it's in spite of technological changes and developments within markets and so those elements are still part of what determine essentially what will happen and how how films and filmmakers see their roles and how their roles are addressed within the work that they do I do want to mention a couple of things that were brought up within that conference because as I say I think they're still relevant today one of the things was the conception that was put forward by George Lamming the Caribbean writer who spoke about sovereignty as the capacity and intention of the people to exercise control over the material base of their survival and a commitment to define their own reality and this was significant because at the same conference we had the Zimbabwean theorist and writer Tadfaana Mahoso who spoke about the problems sorry, I've got his name wrong Tafataoana Mahoso, I remember Mahoso and he spoke very much about a phenomena that was being addressed or that was very evident in the Zimbabwe filmmaking terrain especially Southern Africa but other parts especially East Africa as well and that was to do with the development film I mean we've heard today and we're hearing in this discussion about the role of development and the role of aid and development films which were fictional and which were deliberately fictional because it was a strategy to move from beyond move from beyond the factual presentation of the development agenda to a fictional presentation of the development agenda was something that African cinema has to address I mean it is true that although that has been recognised there are other, the reason that these issues are perennial is because of how this works and how the agencies involved do it change as the technology changes and as issues to do with aesthetics changes and I don't know if Keith will, I don't want to occupy too much of the time I don't know if Keith will speak about that but there are issues around some of the material that's coming out now, contemporary in films coming out of Kenya and other areas who is making them, who is setting the agenda I'll just finish this particular point because I think there is an issue around the need to develop the subject of African audiences as an area of study because I think it was something that was proposed then and I think it still is now I don't know anybody that has been doing that but I think it does relate to a lot of these additional issues My last point before I break is to do with one of the strategies of having sovereignty over your work was also discussed at that time and it was led with a strategy where the filmmakers or at least the national cinemas and some of the filmmakers were looking to their own local governments but also to local investment to start to put together the budgets for their films because very often a budget for a film you will need partners you will need co-productions from other countries and the fact that you could find that locally was a strategy that a lot of people started to use and in doing so it was really important that the agenda that you were part of setting the agenda and one of the things that was that one of the theorists pointed out at that time also was that for Africa to become a significant player and it would be a significant player and this is 20 years ago outside of the question of aesthetics and in rewriting it was sorry it was going to be outside of the question of aesthetics and in rewriting its own version of humanity and I think that is so much the case it's in the case of the films that are coming out of Nollywood it's in the case of the sort of film that we've just seen a clip of the very commercial and cultural presentations but it's also very much the agenda and the case of filmmakers like Abdulrahman Sissako and I particularly mention his work because films like Bamako and films like Timbuktu do address all sorts of issues that you will see continually in development agendas in factual programming and in news but it's what makes his work most significant is the way he can represent the humanity in his fictional representation of Africa it is a unique skill I think it's a rare skill and I think it's the sort of thing that is becoming recognised and needs to be celebrated in many ways I think that you raised some really interesting number of really fascinating issues there Keith, I want to ask you I'm really interested in this question of whether the development agenda is now selling to influence fictional film as a journalist I know myself that my non-fiction journalism was increasingly funded by development agencies something which I think is really problematic and just to pick up on what you said gentlemen from Millennium I think course funding is a challenge but I think there are real problems turning to either corporations or development agencies journalism or fictional filmmaking because that comes with an agenda but I would really like to try and get an answer to this question of who is who has the money who is funding fictional film do you have any answers for us Keith and is this something that we should be aware of is the development agenda creeping into our fictional representations of film first of all I just want to put in context I want to also talk about a little bit of my journey to come to do this which begins with being born in Rhodesia at the time one of the most violent period of Zimbabwe's history was in the 60s and the 70s and I think 30,000 people died that's one thing I'm just trying to put something in context and when we talk about the colonial units what they were doing I was one of the people who went through the process and through our education through the colonial units that were set up in Rhodesia at the time and now the other issue is that cinema came to Africa just maybe within 10 years after the partition of Africa an invention of cinema was in the 1897 somewhere I think the cinemas came to South Africa particularly South Africa with the Lumiere brothers where they were travelling around the continent studied in South Africa and maybe in North Africa as well and you know as I was growing up of course cinema came with his cultural violence to the continent itself which meant that whatever there was about cinema that was introduced to the continent had this kind of takeover of the space which is the space African space and take away everything else any imagination of African African creatives if you like because I just want to make this very brief and I was also remembering you mentioned the the development issues there was media for development in Zimbabwe which was set up in the 70s in the 80s when we started the front line film festival in Arari they were dominating the agenda for how to make films on development which resulted in films like Yellow card and other films that became the genre this type of genre of films that were introduced to the continent particularly in South Africa money coming from the United States for example from the missionaries etc money is coming from now it's not June and I will just come back from Nairobi the government of Kenya decided to decide four million dollars to develop the industry the four million dollars it's about the continent four million dollars is to be spent for the next four years to develop a plan of action that would introduce the film commission that would look out around the continent itself the kind of programs that should be put in place to enable the African the African film industry to develop this also includes the film fund which is going to be set up and issues relating to the infrastructure once upon a time the late Lanunga Cannes a South African filmmaker suggested this that the problems of African cinema itself it's nothing to do because there is no infrastructure lack of infrastructure which means that there is no space for us for filmmakers to discuss with their respective governments to set up the equivalent of the BFI for example the only one in existence is the NFVF which was set up in 1994 as a kind of structure that would enable filmmakers to discuss issues relating to development production exhibition and distribution and in that framework I think that what we're trying to do is to help governments in the continent to address issues relating to film and one question was asked to us what do we want to say if we were to go to the AU and meet all African government heads of government I suggested this to the African heads of government to look at film as business so in other words it's not somewhere removed from the in a sense that you don't look at as a commodity that will make money so in other words we needed to actually get a formula that would enable African heads of state to understand that's what we are at the moment so I think this idea is going to be taken through to Fespaq next week and we continue we continue to talk about the possibilities of persuading perhaps our respecting respective African governments to contribute into the sport of money and is there interest I mean Kenya set aside four million dollars is there interest among other African states for investing in film infrastructure the minister of culture the minister of culture the Kenyan minister of culture is one of the most impressive ministers of cultures I've ever met in the continent decided to take this upon himself to go and meet with other ministers of culture at the AU level because this is part the money itself is handled by Fepas the Federation of Pan-African film makers and he's going to meet up with these respective ministers of culture from different African countries to discuss this project so Nicole can fictional on screen representations be commercially viable at the same time tell us a little bit about how you funded your series and whether now it feels like a commercially sustainable project oh my goodness that's depressing well I'm hoping to get advice from others on that but on season one well I first thought of the idea for the African version of Sex in the City ten years ago and I pitched networks I pitched potential investors and I wasn't going anywhere especially because I had no experience in film that was one of my downfalls so for season one I decided that my goal I want to achieve it so I'm just going to make sure I set aside you know X% of my salary every month so that I can afford to do season one on my own and then of course talk to some family and friends to see what they can chip in so season one was more or less self-funded because that's how much I wanted to get another story out there about Ghanians and Ghanian women etc then it looked hopeful it looked hopeful that for season two with all the press attention that we got that maybe that would mean that season two there would be money flowing in and a lot of people think I'm now a millionaire I'm not I'm just $50,000 in debt from season one so talking to networks and all the networks have talked to us but what I'm finding is there seems to be a structure that we can give our TV producers so it means that networks are really holding all the cards so they want to give you a little bit of money and then have all the rights and I've done one bad marriage before not another so for me the business aspect of it I'm still trying to figure out but I'm doing it I'm now devoted to it full time and so we'll see I'm sure most people here have heard of it I know when I was in Ghana everyone was watching it what has the perception been what's your experience been in terms of audience reaction has it been the people you expected who have been watching it how have they perceived it this is all a shock to me because season one I saw it as being a pilot season and the pilot season I was going to go back to all the networks that rejected me and said look this is what I was talking about this is the kind of content I was talking about and because of my social media experience I knew we could probably get about 5,000 hits per episode I wasn't expecting to now have over 1.5 million views on the channel but I wasn't expecting all the media outlets from Frenchelle Italian Mary Claire and Donna magazine in Germany people from Brazil called me to interview me I wasn't expecting all this I wasn't expecting it but I think now I understand it people were so sick and tired of war, poverty, famine being the only story that can be told about the continent that now you had 5 sexually liberated women it was different it was new and it was different in so many ways I mean even the fact that when creating the show there were so many goals so I'm seeing a lot of women in here with their natural hair actually all five of the women have natural hair but I had to put a wig on somebody I said this does not represent the African continent so I put a wig on somebody she has beautiful natural hair because one of the goals is that anytime I watch black women on TV they only have natural hair if they're playing a role that involves a period piece on slavery or they're poor made or you know I wanted to send a message at no you could be beautiful and glamorous and you're rocking your natural hair so there's so many different goals that the show had we read some of the criticism that all these girls do is sit in restaurants in the 1970s do you know the kind of food shortages Ghana had do you know the kind of food shortages we have so that now in 2014 the fact that we're celebrating that women can go to restaurants and have choice of restaurants that's something to be said so the show is not shallow but you have a shallow perspective when you're saying that all these girls do are sit in restaurants and you have to get food for your children in the 1970s you know yeah we had a lot of women do spend a lot of time sitting in restaurants in a car anyway now we do because we have that choice but it was also interesting because we don't question that when it's five Caucasian women sitting in the UK or the United States but somehow it's a problem when you have five successful wealthy you know done it themselves it was like the single story of the poor African women was so entrenched in even the minds of Africans that this story this fictional story could not be told it wasn't allowed it upset some people made some people uncomfortable so it feels to me like there's a big gap because you know I've never had a conversation with any African person about the media without involving a rant about the usual depictions of Africans fetching water bucket on head, baby on back or dictator or oil, tycoon etc corruption what you're doing it seems is what people of this generation want what they want to watch it was interesting what you said June about that there hasn't been any audience any serious studies of African audiences can we say conclusively that this is what people want why is it a struggle why are you $15,000 in debt you should be a millionaire 50 50, sorry understanding of market forces something's gone awry here does anybody have any insight into the bigger picture of why this doesn't work what are you doing sorry I was going to say that was a suggestion at the conference that was made by filmmaker writer and somebody who teaches African cinema is Nikwate he made that question some time ago but I think it's it's still very relevant and I think that there is a lot of scope today and because it covers so many levels it's not just about the money it's about this interconnection between the academy between audiences and between finances and I think it's that sort of trajectory is a crucial one to bring together to look at what's happening now and what potential there is because I believe that there is great potential and are you seeing any change are things improving are they getting worse what direction are we moving in I just want to jump in and say that African culture African cultural newspaper based in Paris has just done a very recent interesting report on television consumption around the continent focusing on six different African countries not Ghana but it found that the most popular topic for TV series is love so I think this helps to explain the success of Nicole's show as well and we cannot forget those of us who work on the film that television is the main site of consumption of audio visual fictional narratives in Africa and on Ykachi Wambu was speaking this morning also about not forgetting ordinary people we also mustn't forget that one of the main sites of spectatorship in Africa are very basic video halls, tin and wood structures in Kampala, there are 2,000 of these video halls alone and also to look at the creative ways that people are transforming foreign stories so it's not just about what's foreign and what's African there are all kinds of adaptation processes going on, I mean your TV programs and African sex in the city you know and what I found doing research in Uganda is that there's this whole practice of VJing that has developed where the films that the poorest people have access to are bootleg Tollywood and Bollywood and Kung Fu films and but what you have then are these VJs who come in and completely reinterpret the narratives of those foreign films for local audiences and they're not just translating the languages into Uganda they're reinventing the narratives into something completely new and fresh that's often very funny Eddie Murphy may become Eddie Armin in a film and so that we need to have a much broader conception of what constitutes creativity in general it's not simply a foreign versus African thing I don't want to get through this discussion without talking about Hollywood and I'm glad you raised foreign films I mean I know that the depiction of Africans in Hollywood I'd be surprised if anyone here disagrees it's quite shocking and you know I went to a screening of Selma recently and it occurred to me that it took British a British team basically to put that together but the people from Pathie were saying you know it's great there's this whole new perception of black films you know we had twelve years of slaves we had the butler you know but these again films which involve a black person being essentially in a role of subservience with the white hero what what is the link between African film industry and mainstream Hollywood depictions of African film and how important is it to you all that these African films reach an international audience or should we be primarily concerned with African audiences I think we do bring I mean for the last twenty years I've been working at the BFI as an advisor to the BFI bringing African films at the BFI and there's an audience there's a mixed audience for that in Nigeria for example we have had is it going too far it was screened in a stadium for about in a sort of like a theater which is about maybe approximately about one thousand people it's a question of how these things are put together and I think that people make films there are so many films that are being made right now the other thing is that I was surprised that a few years ago at the Greenwich audience that there was never any African film put at the audience and sometimes people had to beg the audience to screen their films but now you have like four screens at any one time every week they are full in Nigeria for the first time in Nigeria the new brand new theaters by the film house in Lagos opening in Lagos in Port Harcourt and the people are big building theaters now this is what I was saying about infrastructure has to be in place first to address all these kind of problems about audience don't forget in the 70s particularly in Nigeria and other places that they were destroying theaters in order to make way for churches for prayers so what then you have a problem now you make films but you don't have any place to screen them because of the church the church is one of the fastest growing kind of in most countries in the continent so you have those kind of problems in the continent the audiences are there but you see the problem is that how do we get from film to that to the audience and I think that it has to be done professionally again the online in the digital technologies is enabling people like Roko TV and others to be able to get online to create a business plan that would enable that to address those kind of issues but I think the audience is there it's a question of how do you create a vehicle to get to that audience there's another point of your work Nicole that bypasses the networks and distributors to get straight to people through online and I would say I was not so caught up in the audience I was yes I wanted a show that was for people like me who wanted to sit in Ghana but didn't necessarily want to watch Hollywood movies didn't necessarily want to watch Nollywood movies but wanted to find something that kind of represented who I am but I wasn't caught up in in the audience but what I found was I just I did something that I think just women could relate to so my favorite comment on YouTube was a woman who said she was sitting she says I'm a Puerto Rican American born in New York but I live in Italy and what do I have in common with these girls everything and so for me that was just it still remains my favorite comment because that's what I was supposed to be about just supposed to be about the female experience we can all connect no matter where you are in the world and that once again the Ghanaian woman is not marginalized so people don't put her in the other category but put her in no we're all women and there's experiences that we all share can I just say as well that in relation to your question about Hollywood and African cinema I mean I think funding for African cinema comes from a mixed economy I mean you don't look at one area or another it comes from across the board in a way all different elements whether it's state whether it's personal investment whether it's in the go-go whether it's some of the big foundations but what is more interesting is that what people outside of the continent are looking to the continent for especially Hollywood is quite interesting both Keith and I have been on a scheme that's run by Focus Features which is as you know is part of Columbia Focus Features? For some years and that scheme called Africa First was supporting short films by African filmmakers out of that scheme came Rungano's Once of the Great out of that scheme came Henry's film Pumsy many others that you will have seen and what they were particularly looking for I mean they're not particularly benevolent what they were doing is they were trying to establish relationships with young creators on the African continent and to try and develop African stories for African territories and that was a specific role that a company, a small company within a bigger Hollywood company was trying to do and they had done it for Latin America with some new filmmakers and some other areas and they had definitely been looking to the African continent for that because I mean big studios after a time they are pretty bereft of stories and they see the continent and the creativity on the continent and the imagination and the vibrancy of the African continent as really this area that is going to provide for them this massive possibility for new films on the continent and I think that that should still be explored of course you have to know what you're doing when you're going into that arena but I do think it's still a possibility that you could run apart from the short films they did have a number of films on their development slate for features so the idea was that you establish these relationships with young filmmakers who have ideas and who have stories and then you develop a relationship with them and with their feature films you then put them on to one of their development slays and they supported that way and the reason I mention them is because I don't think it's the only strategy that was why I said I think it's a mixed economy there are very many different ways and different elements that you can bring into this mix about funding for African cinema I'm going to open up to questions in a moment I just want to ask one more question from the panel about festivals because for those of people here who haven't been to Wagadogu or any of the major African film festivals what role are they playing in nurturing African film into the future I'm interested in it I think the festivals play a different role I mean I think that everyone knows about the Wagadogu, the biggest festival the first parkour known as and also in South Africa there is a potential big festival which is the Devin International Film Festival in North Africa there is the Katharge Film Festival and of course in East Africa they all play different roles and first parkour is a traditional home for African cinema it means that almost all the filmmakers from all parts of the continent go including people like ourselves I mean we just go and watch films and of course anyone who is interested in African films goes to first parkour it's not just for markets it's just for people who appreciate African cinema they go there for that and of course the Devin International Film Festival it is international set in South Africa but of course trying to bring the other creators and professionals from other parts of the world to come and network with South African and African filmmakers who go there so they also have different papers and of course Zanzibar International Film Festival as it is and I always felt that people go to Zanzibar because it's a sexy name because Zanzibar International Film Festival people go there but it's a beautiful place it's a place where Africa is not Arab but it's all mixed with all these kind of possibilities that you can find in the ocean exactly so that's have a good life doing the math on your main work destiny no we don't get paid hard work and then of course here this is kind of like festivals here taking place in the United Kingdom of course in Afghanistan but in the continent as a whole those are the primary festivals there's the first parkour as I say and then a Devin International Film Festival and Zanzibar International Film Festival of course we have started another festival in Calabar in Nigeria which in Nigerians think that is the biggest festival I say to them no it's not the biggest festival but it's there and I've just finished writing a book on film festivals I think my colleagues were very sceptical of writing a book on this topic as you say and getting to Swann Aranti these wonderful locations but one of the things that really intrigued me that came out of the research is that festivals of all kinds have actually proliferated in this era of digitalisation so you might have thought that it would be the opposite so you think why is this the case and I think it really is because people are seeking out more and more face to face live experiences in the face of this digital onslaught in us perhaps becoming more isolated and obviously healthy debate with people from a range of different cultural backgrounds is always the basis for a good healthy democracy and that's what I'm sure Keith and June and I could all give you many experiences from working at and being at festivals where one sees incredible debates and arguments happening but that further this idea of democracy now obviously festivals are rare you know rare events and I think there's a potential there too because as opposed to the news which we tend to watch regularly one can become desensitised as a viewer because you can see horrific things on the 6 o'clock news and you know you're going to see the same things the next day and so festivals and fiction films kind of freeze moments and they say take this one and a half hours for normal life and watch this powerful story and for that reason it can often have more impact on viewers than these you know genres that ask us to watch them regularly and therefore chuck them out regularly as well I think festivals have for a number of periods had a really crucial part to play in adding to the the whole strategy of getting African films out there because distribution is one of the big problems that African films face, African filmmakers face with their work and sometimes when films come into a country this is one of the things that we had to do here in the UK in the 90s as well there's less and less opportunity for people to see African films outside of festivals and so when films came in we would try to see what the possibility is to make a link between a number of cities I know it's done now with some festivals here where the films could be leased for a period of time and then circulated to a number of those not always festivals but also film theatres around the country and I know a number of countries that do that now because you're battling all the time and if a distributor doesn't have the finance or is unable to take it up and there's no channel 4 to do your television presale as they used to in the 90s to help small independent distributors festivals are now almost like a distribution circuit because they very often for a lot of films they're the only way that some of these films are going to be seen internationally and I should say also that I work with showing African films in India a film festival in Kerala and Chennai and those countries don't forget one of the things that one of the context for African cinema is a wider one that links to issues and questions of third cinema so whether it's Latin America whether it's Asia there are people that see parallels and that want to know the cinema of the continent and of the culture and they are hungry for it programming with Kerala since 1997 and there is a vibrant interest there there are even one or two distributors that are looking for films there so I think we need to be as expansive African cinema needs to be expansive in its ambitions for audiences as that go not just with the technological approach but through the structures that are there and that are interested in seeing African cinema one last question is around small festivals and I work with a very small festival in Addis Ababa because they don't have much money and they are trying to get going and one of the interesting things there is the most popular films and the biggest films are always the locally produced films no matter how bad they are they are the ones that you have to have on the agenda and with that alongside that you can bring in films from other parts of the continent and other parts of the Pan-African so the diaspora as well but those small festivals have a very specific role in helping to develop people's tastes and helping to develop audiences and helping to actually expand people's knowledge and experience of their own continent and I think that's quite an important one to have as well I think that's a great note in which to end our discussion here and open up to questions from the floor so I will take questions I'll start at the back with the lady in yellow and we've got about 20 minutes questions please keep your questions to a question I know many people have strong views here there's going to be scope to discuss and make points afterwards during lunch so if you could be disciplined and keep this to questions so that we can make the most out of the panel members we've got here I would really appreciate that yes please and it's a question and a concern that follows on from something Afroa and Nicole said which is that in 2015 there still seems to be a challenge around acknowledging the complexity and the humanity of black Africans on screen and that sort of ranges from you know the kind of depiction of the Ebola crisis to sort of uproar and debates around black female protagonists and mainstream media which includes sort of Nicole's an African city you know the scandals of this world the how to get away with murder and I'm just wondering whether it's well overdue in 2015 that we and when I say we I mean Africans and non-Africans sort of stick their heads above the parapet and say that you know some things got to give acknowledge that there is a complete lack of acknowledgement that you know the representation of black people on the screens is as complex as any other race so just sort of the panels views on on that really so I mean I think individually most people acknowledge that are you saying there should be some kind of unified statement of because because I feel like the current debate feels quite confined to just black audiences who are talking about the lack of diversity and complexity and it needs I think for non-Africans as well as Africans to acknowledge that as well so I think with the numbers of an African city you know we did see that there's a large percentage of those numbers came from out of the continent then there was an assumption made that the numbers that came outside of the continent were from the African diaspora but you know some of we don't really there were a lot of non-Africans who were championing the show because they also like the idea that hold on the whole time I've been told that the continent of Africa is about huts it's about lines in somebody's backyard et cetera et cetera but now I'm seeing people who are actually either just like me or have their own stories but whatever the case it's a different story and I feel like non-Africans were were behind it so I think it's just the responsibility of if you have, if you believe in this then I feel like it's your responsibility to go out and do something about it and for me that's what an African city was about I was not going to complain about this anymore I was going to sit behind the desk of development agencies pumping out the same old negative stories I was going to do something about it with a show like an African city and I'm hoping to do more shows in the future and I'm hoping more and more other producers, directors, writers come on board to write their own stories to make their own shows et cetera because there's some people who do get mad at an African city because they say hold on but this isn't the story of the African returning well there's a continent of over 50 African countries a continent of over a billion people millions of millions of us have left and come back there's not going to be even one story even when telling the story of the African returning there's going to be many many stories so yeah I just feel like when you watch Hollywood films about white Americans no one says this isn't the experience of the white American you know do you do it does anyone here think that we should be taking it further and doing something to kind of build a movement I think that's kind of what you're suggesting that there needs to be some kind of movement to you know challenge what is still existing and it is shocking sometimes when you take a step back and look at people who don't go to these festivals and don't watch these films the images, the messages they are still getting who maybe haven't watched an African city they are still getting the message that Africans every time I wrote about sex when I was in Ghana I would have hundreds of complaints that I didn't mention FGM and the idea that any African woman could be having sex which didn't involve FGM it's just too much for our readers to cope with do you think that we should be well one thing I will say though I'm not necessarily I know everything I've probably said today sounds like I'm doing this for the ignorant westernized person who doesn't understand the continent of Africa but I'm actually doing it I'm selfishly doing it because I'm thinking about my six-year-old experience in Gold is Green where exactly I was asked about huts and lines in my backyard so if there's a six-year-old right now in Gold is Green I don't want her to be asked those questions for that 15-year-old girl in Scarzel, New York who's asked about oh does it mean that you're simply do you have HIV because you're from Ghana I want whichever 15-year-old Nigerian girl or Nigerian boy sitting in Scarzel, New York I don't want him to ask those questions so I'm actually doing it I'm actually yeah I'm doing it for those of us abroad who don't have to be subjected to those kind of questions I think that's something for us all to think about very much for your question right I will take a question from this lady in the I think I think the problem with that is that often people don't answer the questions because they answer the one that's easiest to answer so we're not going to be able to take all the questions but I do want to try and we'll see how it goes after the next couple of questions okay yeah thanks hi my name is Tokubo Ewhathroich and I'm here at Niko so my question is I'm sure there are lots of people here who are wondering who have maybe desires to make a movie or a documentary and as we've all heard it's so difficult getting funding oh sorry what advice would you give to anybody who has that dream and still wants to make it but cannot self-fund because that's an issue so besides getting a sugar daddy or a sugar mommy right because that's an option so season two what's been very helpful yes we're talking to networks but like I said you know they are you know throwing out some numbers out there but the numbers don't still meet my budget but another option is sponsors I might have to tell season two YouTube fans that listen if one of my girls is holding a brand or something making a whole minute to drink it just forgive us you know it's product placement I need to find a way to fund this series but for season two if we don't go the network route and we don't have a network pre-finance or give us the money we need to produce season two we'll go the sponsorship route and basically you know five, six sponsors to give X amount of money and then we just promise them product placement do you not have to make a pilot in order to persuade sponsors to come on board sponsors have seen season one but I mean to somebody else who maybe can't afford to sell fund a pilot series I skipped a step that's true a pilot episode is always a good way to go and you know for me the way I see there was a lot of people who made some sacrifices for the pilot season season one so whether they did something for free six cousin call that cousin call whoever you need to there are a lot of people who are able to offer some support for free if they really believe in the vision I don't call an African city a TV show I call it a movement and there were people who were just really behind it who wanted to see it succeed wanted to see it change the narrative a blogger today called it my personal silent protest but I think there's also a lot of people out there just willing to be supportive so find those people find those people who believe in your project not just financially but with other kind of support lady wearing the hat on the end there yep my question hi my name is Denise and my question really pulls together a number of strands of discussion there have been a discussion about audience and agenda there's been a discussion about business case there's been a discussion about democratisation of media through Twitter etc and really to pick up on two strands one that Nicole and June is the democratisation of finance through crowdfunding I know June mentioned it in terms of Indiegogo but my question really is how well do we have a grip of understanding crowdfunding in all of its guises from the investment to the rewards base to the donation base because it is about engagement of audience as well as finance and really understanding how that works seems to me that it may feel some of the gaps that have been highlighted continually but I mean really understanding it and the platform that you're standing on is media which I understand is pivotal to the success of crowdfunding so is there some way to consolidate that comprehension and be able to come up with the strategy that pulls understanding of that initiative with creators to ensure that someone can take care of the backlog of what needs to happen and facilitate that for people to make media so one of the actresses of an african city Nana Menso who plays Shadea she has started a project or filmed a project called Queen of Glory and to get Queen of Glory at least filmed it's not been edited yet but to get it filmed she said 90% of her funding came from the west it seemed like Ghanians and Africans weren't interested in financing her art so yeah right now she's doing an Indiegogo campaign I think it's about five days in and she's already over $17,000 her goal is by end of May to have $36,000 but I'm just saying in five days she's been able to raise $17,000 and yeah it was she had a whole team behind it you know the rewards were doable but she got the right I mean Huffington posted a story on her the other day Afro Al so she had traditional media outlets and she had non-traditional media outlets really pushing the Indiegogo web link and so now yes in five days a Ghanian American woman has been able to raise $17,000 and you guys should all check it out on Kickstarter.com Kickstarter and it's Queen of Glory and I love Nana Mence's philosophy she said you know what we're going to do this all or nothing I'm using Kickstarter because the way Kickstarter works is that if you don't reach that $36,000 goal if you raise $20,000 you raise $30,000 all that money goes at the end of the campaign whereas with Indiegogo you at least get to keep whatever you raised but she said we're going to do all or nothing and that energised the team to really you know go out there and with the all or nothing attitude we'll show sites like this for Africans and I think there have been some people who want to do African versions of Kickstarter, African version of Indiegogo I'm not sure how far it went but it will be great I really think it's a good question I'm not sure which are going to be the institutions but I do believe that national cinema national cinema institutions which there are a number within the African continent and a pan-African organisation that's supposed to cover development of cinema on the continent like Fespaco needs to be involved in doing just that in putting out a lot of these strategies there and they're in a position because they work so closely with the AU to actually make the case for the legal and other infrastructure the business side of making these things happen on the continent and across the continent so I think that those are some of the institutions that can do that and that should be doing it Thank you, yes, the lady in the red is over there I should also say major festivals like Fespaco at the moment this year they're discussing the digital landscape and they're in a good position because they draw together so many people from around the continent to put it on the agenda and to have that as a strategy where they bring together all the people with that information to actually make it available Hi, my name's Kaliki I actually have two short questions my first one is about African city and to me it was basically about women who were presiding in the diaspora and had been brought back to the African mass and were just re-adapting themselves to all its commitments but is there a final goal to it is there a final success that you're striving for and how do you cope and respond to criticisms especially from Africans that these women are white people and my other question is how can we bring authentic African especially African history to western media or like a pan-African outlet to western media Is the second question for me? Could you just repeat the second question sorry, the second one How can we bring African authentic history apart from slavery into western media or a pan-African outlet into western media Good questions I'll start with you again What's your name, what's your first name? Kaliki What is a white person? Can you tell me what a white person is? What's a white person? I'm turning the question on you What's a white person? That's a good answer When you answer that I'll answer your question While Kaliki is thinking about that and another issue is that you're talking about June raised a point earlier on Just your second question One of the things that June said was quite important people have to remember this the fact that focus features have been thinking about Africa as a place to find stories because one thing he said the future of Hollywood is in the past so in other ways there's no more stories from Hollywood anymore because we asked a question I think he's developing also a story on Fela as a feature film He's never been to Nigeria but he knows Fela is quite important everyone knows about this guy and they're developing a story on Fela as a feature film and of course the story itself became a documentary and of course people know of finding Fela and it is a feature film and I think that quite several scripts that are being developed by other people from somewhere else to try and find stories in the continent itself and I think that you will find that because what Nicole is doing is just a small little thing about the continent itself but you see things can be possible in all different directions and I think that we have to admire the courage and also the vision of this team to have been able to do to achieve this as possible to do anything you want in the continent Anyone else on the panel like to answer the second question about history there's actually been a lot of incredible African films that deal with history and the pre-colonial history that we said it's so important to tell there was a whole movement in the 1980s in West Africa which is called the return to the source movement where filmmakers like Soleil Mansisi, Shayk Omosisoko, Danny Cuyate told stories like the Sunjata epic often very cleverly as well using that fiction to disguise critique of things in the present as well so I think this is a big problem there are those films out there and the kind of work that Keith and June and I have done as curators is to try to let people know that those films exist because a huge part of the problem is that there's just a lack of knowledge that these films in fact exist so we have that heritage there Gaston Cabore Gaston Cabore from Burkina Faso his work is focused on pre-colonial culture and stories of Burkina Faso but also the work of Semben Usman I know that we call on him a lot but his work Ceddo was about a time of pre-colonial experience and also even post-colonial or yes, the colonial period, the film like Camp Thieroy that the French never wanted an episode of French history that the French would like to forget and tried to forget and denied in so many ways Camp Thieroy is a film that actually represents that telling a historical moment from the perspective of an African filmmaker so some of these films exist I think they need to continue to be made because as we've said we're discussing here the impact and the importance of fiction or dramatic films dramatic films representing the past and what we haven't talked about a lot was the aesthetic impact but we know that films in a fiction format can sometimes reach a wider audience who might turn away from a realism or a documentary presentation of that topic so it is important that it continues June, when you speak I feel, you know there's that ad that says there's an app for that a lot of the questions feel like there's a film for that you kind of have a film answer for everything when will I hate to reduce it to this but when will there be a day when I can watch these films on my skybox when it's available at the click of a remote and how can people see them now and is there any way you can see it's going to get easier they'll be more accessible the archive more and more things are going up on YouTube so even with NAFTI in Ghana National Institute of Film and Television I mean more and more they're putting up student films on the YouTube channel but I'm just saying more and more you do find these things online I mean I was talking about Iroko TV for example you can find those films on Iroko TV platform and also other platforms several platforms that you know you find those films and of course if you are looking for a kind of films you know these Martin School says set up a foundation the world film cinema foundation to restore classic films from all over the world and then some of some of those films include African films include Tookie Bookie which are the Tookie Bookie Cicers film and you know so you can find those films that are valuable but it's a question of actually finding a place where to look and as I say online you can also find those Can I just add to that Booni TV as well has a lot of African classics online now but I do think a big issue is that internet penetration across Africa still remains only at 15% so we do need to take into account who still has access to these films online and it's largely us in the diaspora there are exciting projects on the continent as well Diol Oganyemi's Project City Mart in Kenya which is a chain of cinemas for people who can't afford high ticket prices so these tickets cost the equivalent of 20 British cents and there's a whole range of films shown including African classics so that those films are actually shown on the continent to the poorest people as well. I mentioned just briefly and glibly the archive but I do take it very seriously because it's what I'm trying to set up here and it's based on all these years of curating African cinema but I do believe the continent itself has lost a lot of these films and are trying to value and are trying to gather them archives are really important and through archives hopefully there will be strategies for making access to a lot of these materials available and not only to the films themselves but a lot of the art and the artefacts that go with African cinema because it is an artistic cinema is a combination of a whole range of different art forms including the publicity of cinema and around it you've got whole traditions and whole movements of different art forms and it's really valuable that it should be kept and maintained and so I do make a strong case for archives being part of that solution to how films continue to be seen. I'm just going to take one more question and we have to break for lunch gentlemen over here in the blue shirt. My name is George I just wanted to draw from the question that came from there because it then made me think about what it was bothering me about the first two sessions and how it might be connected to now and I hope it will run for the rest of the afternoon and it has to do with what is, by putting this what is the Africa in African cinema? What is it? The Africa in African cinema or rather what is the Africa if you take Africa as having a special place in contemporary critical theory contemporary critical thinking what does it say about the subject of representation and it seems to me if you enter it that way then the question who is the African becomes clear so it's a very important question it's also important in the sense that a number of people are being asked in places like this one how come I even got a black academy teaching me that's what she means about where are we in relation to the conversations going on it's a very serious one rather than dismiss it that way So let me tell you why I disagree I haven't finished there is a difference between white people and the whiteness of power that's what she's referring to just sort of park that the second remark how come to the second remark how come to is and I'm really very I'm grateful to both June and Keith in a slightly different way for reminding us about two things one is the you know the federation of the Rhodigion in Ysland was the last bastion of Greater Britain it informed you know Suez was founded by Roy Walenski and all that lot it is the dress rehearsal of the bow group far right new right in the metropolis so central republic of Africa post war is very important for us to understand the politics of representation now and the key thing like Mahoso interesting enough it's been one of those people banned from traveling in this country for the last 20 years epistemically sustained by was the Africa in the Royal African Society so it is a very important question in that sense okay thank you for your question I know Nicole is keen to respond and then I will put it to other panellins if they'd like to say something so before we did this panel remember A4 asking me what's one thing that has shocked you through making an African city and I think what shocked me is there were some Africans who said that this is not African enough that this is an African but the way I see it I consider myself Ghanaian there's a story of many African immigrants who were raised abroad and whether they were raised in black neighborhoods, white neighborhoods whatever my caste are also women who were raised abroad but they very much consider themselves Ghanaian and I mean we're allowed to self-identify and the art that we create we're also allowed to identify as what we see it as being so when people come to me and say something's not African enough my response is always well what is African enough and I love it especially in Ghana I remember somebody asking me that question and immediately you said well that you're wearing looks just fabulous on you but he was talking about how it's not authentic it's not authentically Ghanaian but I mean I don't see him wearing his asante to work I don't see him wearing his a kente cloth day in and day out but what is so interesting is that I feel like with the western world I was fighting against the single story put on Africa by the west but now I feel like wait hold on I'm having this argument against a single story Anyone else like to comment and this is why people don't create stories I mean this is one of the reasons I was at the earlier panel I believe you were saying that African women should be creating stories should be putting on film but the way I see it okay I'm a Ghanaian woman I put it out there and then I'm going to hear these kind of criticisms which I'll take but it's now I'm hearing that it's not African enough I think for what it's worth we're going to have to wrap up I think it's a very valid question to discuss I think there should always be a space to discuss what we mean by Africa and I think at the same time it's very worrying when people police our identity which is something that I think you're talking about I have talked and written about a lot if anyone else would like to say anything I think it's a question of I would just like to say something that came out of the keynote speaker at the Africa in the history of cinematic ideas conference Sylvia, Professor Sylvia Winter and this was 20 years ago and of course when we're defining things like Africa or African cinema we're actually talking about representation and what she said was representation is an as an ideologically determined expression of being is an ideologically determined expression of being so it doesn't exist without having a point of view an ideology of where you are it is part of what you think and how you think of and how you look at the world and as such African cinema is located at the epicenter of it so African cinema as well is determined it's ideologically determined and it comes from you taking a position a particular position in one way or another it's not apolitical it is culture so it is political wonderful I think also I just was taking a notice when Saint Ben said something like unless the whole continent was prepared to fight for its own true identity and self respect smart national anthems and flags of whatever colour would not translate into a genuine liberation of the African continent so identity is the point of reference which she was talking about you have to understand the cultural identity and you have to perhaps vouch for that as a starting point to reclaim your true identity and then follow through that path and I think that for me it makes sense great I just want to give a round of applause for our panel thank you very much