What chance of a film industry in Botswana?

NEIL PARSONS | Friday January 18, 2008 00:00

More recently we have had news of two satellite television content-providers, SABIDO (holding company of etv) and Munhumutape Pay-TV, setting up shop in transmission or production facilities in Gaborone. Over the past 10 or 20 years, digital cameras and computer editing have dramatically opened up filmmaking possibilities in 'remote' places. Things are looking up for drama films and documentaries made in Botswana.

Botswana already has one of the world's major wildlife film industries, based in Maun and Chobe. Dereck and Beverly Joubert have made prize-winning films for international television channels, and a full-length elephant drama called Whispers for Hollywood (Buena Vista). Tim and June Liversedge have rivalled them in producing wildlife documentaries, and are building on the success of their lion documentary Roar! being shown on giant Imax screens in major cities around the world.

Maun-Chobe wildlife films took off in the late 1980s, as a spin-off from safari industries moving into Botswana from East Africa. By comparison, Gaborone's film industry is small and still struggling. The oldest established Gaborone firm is Dipolelo/Storyline (Renee Gilbert & John Clement), set up in 1994, which made its name in human documentaries and is about to flight 26 half hour episodes of its drama 'soapie' Lelia & Co on Botswana Television (BTV) in 2008. Two other Gaborone filmmakers, with reputations made prior to or separate from BTV, are the documentarist Billy Kokorwe and Moabi Mogorosi famous for his short drama film Hot Chillie.

The big buzz seven or eight years ago was the opening of BTV with large new premises and state-of-the-art technical equipment. One German multinational production company, Looks Productions, with an eye on BTV opening up the bigger African market, set up a Gaborone branch in collaboration with local producer/ director George Eustice.

BTV, however, proved to be a big disappointment. It failed to commission programmes from local producers, and it failed to serve the pan-African market presented by its satellite 'footprint' as far as Nigeria. Hence Looks withdrew from Botswana. Since then, BTV has only tendered and commissioned programmes by outside producers for two of its seven years of existence. With no regular commissioning to cover their investments in people and equipment, local film producers have been frustrated and impoverished, or have fled abroad.

Filming of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency in under 40 days around July 2007 gave very valuable but temporary experience to a legion of film workers in Gaborone. A film-of-the-filmbeing-filmed was made (for an eventual DVD extra feature) by Moabi Mogorosi on behalf of Miramax, the Hollywood partner in the Mirage (New York & London) and Rainbow Nation (Johannesburg) production. Botswana's contribution of$5 million to the production's more than $40 million expenses can be counted as a very good investment in future tourist development-to focus tourist interest on the populated eastern half of the country. The investment has also set up a semi-permanent film set under Kgale hill. The set can be used for the filming of an envisaged 13-part BBC television series, and can become a tourist attraction in itself.

The movie made under Kgale has whetted the appetite of many Batswana for filmmaking, and may attract more multinational moviemakers (good and bad) to come to Botswana. Gaborone's new branch of Limkokwing University College of Creative Technology will also start to feed the market with technicians in a year or two, while Media Studies at the University of Botswana is already producing graduates hungry for jobs. But all of this will not do much to grow the local film industry, which operates on a much smaller scale than Hollywood-style movie production but desperately lacks distribution and exhibition inside the country.

Local film production needs regular commissioning to keep it alive. That's why the coming of SABIDO and Munhumutape Pay-TV is potentially so exciting.

SABIDO has bought into local free-to-air Gaborone Broadcasting (GBC- TV founded 1988), and hopefully will take in some local production as well as transmitting its e-tv based satellite content inside Botswana. Munhumutape Pay-TV (MABC- TV) has acquired land to build production studios in Gaborone's northern suburb of Phakalane. MABC-TV plans to broadcast six channels with heavy African content to nine African countries: Tourism, News, Sport, Music, Movies, and Children's.

Like any hi-tech and high quality producer, MABC-TV will have to bring in chosen foreign employees and consultants from neighbouring countries (Gaborone is only an hour's flight away from Johannesburg). But it will also need not only Batswana employees but, more importantly, Botswana content provided by independent local producers.

However, MABC- TV may have a hard struggle to establish itself. For a start it faces the already well-established Multichoice/M-Web Afrika, carried by DSTV, part of an entertainment monopoly covering Southern Africa that dates back almost a century to 1915. Secondly, it faces the Kenya-based satellite television network GTV, already licensed in Botswana.

Thirdly it faces no less than three new satellite providers in South Africa, including Mpumulanga TV and SABIDOI e-tv. Mpumulanga TV has an Africanist agenda similar to MABC-TV's. SABIDOI e-tv, also licensed in Botswana with its GBC affiliate, appears to have surrendered its transmission rights to DSTV. What that means, of course, is that you won't need to buy a separate decoder to pick it up. Buying a separate decoder will be a major disincentive for established DSTV viewers to switch to any of the new satellite content providers.