cultural production in film in Africa?’ can only produce more questions. Given the differences amongst women, what are the intersections or similarities in the ways in which they experience their cultural practice? What are the coping mechanisms which they might share? What are the specifics? What are the challenges and chances of succeeding as women film practitioners on the African continent?
Women who work in film as cultural practitioners are not only filmmakers. They are also businesswomen and entrepreneurs, curators and cultural critics. They are writers or producers. Some of these women’s voices are collected in this book.
The chapters on production and curatorial practices reposition women’s film and filmmaking from the margin to a more visible, prominent position and allow these voices to be heard, at times even in their disharmony.
The film practitioners, also as producers and directors and interview subjects, reflect a multi-faceted understanding of gender relations, gendered inequalities and political agency – either as individual or collective and at times both. This agency may be claimed in the name of feminism or not. In Jyoti Mistry’s contribution, ‘Filmmaking at the Margins of a Community’, a number of competing understandings of agency emerge. In the course of her role as co-producer of Elelwani (Ntshavheni wa Luruli, 2012), the tensions between the narrative world of the film and the real-world experience of the rural women participating in its production becomes starkly evident. She analyses the experiences of agency for the women in the local Venda community as a split experience, as double consciousness: women at once the subjects of a sovereign and citizens in a South African democratic state. For some women filmmakers the identification with feminist theory and practice is political in various enabling ways; it connects their filmmaking practice with socio-political change. While on the one hand they acknowledge their agency, as in the case of Jihan El-Tahri’s interview, they also recognise their marginality in the broader hegemonic, patriarchal sense in the ‘business’ of filmmaking, as expressed in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s ‘A Manifesto’.
The inclusion of conversations and reflections by Shannon Walsh and Arya Lalloo on their collaborative filmmaking project Jeppe on a Friday (2012) is an important marker of how women filmmakers are not only experimenting with alternative film languages but are also finding different approaches to the production process of filmmaking. It is a conversation about the centrality of new aesthetics emerging in the context of different ways of filmmaking, and about how content and form are mutually informative.
Their collaborative project sets into motion numerous interrogatory questions regarding how geo-political positions and cultural assumptions come to inform content, one filmmaker being from the North (Walsh) and the other from the South (Lalloo). As Lalloo and Walsh observe, there are inherent mistrusts from the outside that are also imposed on these forms of collaboration as to the equity of conceptual and creative inputs. These filmmakers not only reflect on how these mistrusts operate, but show how they become productive spaces for ensuring their own interrogation of the power of representation in both the characters they choose and how they tell their stories.
In some ways the issue of mistrust mirrors the debates expressed by Dorothee Wenner regarding North-South initiatives that have enabled African filmmakers in various projects. It is worth considering how the opportunity afforded to the young and talented filmmaker Hawa Essuman (see Wenner’s contribution) is in part undermined through this rhetoric and instead of the opportunity being seen as empowering it reproduces, in dangerous ways, the absence of creative and political agency that has historically been denied to women. But in their interview, Lalloo and Walsh reflect a powerful political agency not only in the production choice to collaborate, but also in the demand to reconsider historical privileging of the male gaze. In their film they select five male characters from the inner-city neighbourhood of Jeppestown to explore urban regeneration and development. Their stylistic choices of how to shoot, engage with and represent the male protagonists provide a refreshing observation of masculinity in an urban context. The decision to represent women in their absence against a backdrop of a male-dominated part of the city provides a significant creative and political intervention. These decisions invite debate and Walsh and Lallo express their differing lack of resolution regarding the gender politics of this choice.
Anita Khanna, as a seasoned writer, festival director and producer, offers a general overview of the local South African and global climate for women filmmakers, balancing the tensions between commercial imperatives, independent filmmaking and the specifics of the African context for women filmmakers. She suggests that women work differently in the production process, and she shows how this results in different kinds of films. Women’s approach to filmmaking is different, she maintains, not only in the narratives they choose, but significantly also, in how they work on set and with crews.
This duality of critical analysis and creative practice is one of the modes through which women filmmakers seek to interrupt, to destabilise and to defy dominant representations of women’s histories, and in so doing seek to create new cinematic languages that best express women’s histories and women’s experiences.
Katarina Hedrén’s review of Barakat! (Djamila Sahraoui, 2006) addresses the representation of the film’s main female characters who access public spaces in search of one of their husbands in war-torn Algeria. She problematises the tensions between ‘normative’ modes of representing women in Africa and those representations from African women filmmakers that challenge this ‘normativity’. Hedrén briefly discusses three film narratives which empower women in different ways before presenting a close reading of Barakat! She examines how Sahraoui moves the women protagonists in her film away from the ‘victim’ label that society is so ready to put on women affected by war, oppression and trauma and in so doing shapes a narrative that reflects on the split consciousness of the women and their feelings about their political environment. In Hedrén’s words, Sahraoui ‘chooses to portray women who, out of desperation, fear or simply because “they are done” with being oppressed and victimised, decide to take control over their own destinies’.
The place of co-productions and collaborations with European countries plays a vital role in how content is produced and exhibited, but is also the site of contested politics, as is revealed in Dorothee Wenner’s candid piece on festival programming. She recounts the making of Soul Boy (Hawa Essuman and Tom Tykwer, 2010) and the ‘external forces’ that effect, shape or challenge definitions. While co-productions with France, Germany and Portugal are less foregrounded in the book, it is evident through experiences recounted by filmmakers like Taghreed Elsanhouri and Jihan El-Tahri that funding plays a pivotal role in how films come to be made and eventually distributed.
Limited infrastructure locally and nationally are just two of many production obstacles and why funding is often sought abroad. Funding from abroad, however, often determines the content. Taghreed Elsanhouri, Jihan El-Tahri and Tsitsi Dangarembga all offer reflections and experiences regarding this context and the political terrain which, at times, both enables and disables the possibility of a climate more conducive to women’s making films on the African continent. Often foreign agencies that commission content are the primary sources for women filmmakers to produce content, and while this sector is a viable mode for income and employment as film practitioners, the content is often determined by the briefs from these agencies.
These push-pull factors are the underlying source of tensions, which also inform the conditions of reception for films. Films commissioned by agencies are, in some instances, not for local consumption, and films produced with local markets in mind are driven by a different set of imperatives. Wenner’s contribution on the politics in the world of film festival programming is a revealing and complex unfolding of how festivals are perfectly poised to introduce African content to European audiences. In the context of film festivals, there is an openness and receptivity to African films even though there remains a ‘stigma’ that African films are issue driven or bleak. However, the economic drivers outside the festival circuit paint a wholly different picture: European distributors and exhibitors are less likely to sign on African films as part of their general programming
