African films shine, lighting a tough road

If Michael Mahomba wants to take his girlfriend to the movies, he must spend an hour in a minibus taxi in this South African shanty town and a day’s wages on tickets.

“That’s why I don’t go that often,” says Mahomba, 21, standing in a community hall not far from his corrugated iron shack in Khayelitsha, a teeming township outside Cape Town.

A string of films made in or about Africa, such as “Yesterday” and “Hotel Rwanda,” plus a handful of high-profile awards, have thrown the spotlight on the world’s poorest continent and sparked talk of a movie renaissance.

But a tiny fraction of Africans visit movie theaters, and experts say Hollywood glamour is pointless if the industry fails to build a local audience by taking distinctly African films to people like Mahomba in townships, slums and villages.

“We need to make films that speak to black people, not some nebulous international audience,” said Mark Dornford-May, director of the award-winning South African film “U-Carmen eKhayelitsha.” “And we need to find alternatives to shopping mall cinemas in smart suburbs.”

Living up to his maxim, Dornford-May held the premiere of “U-Carmen” -- a remake of Georges Bizet’s 19th century opera set in a tough South African township and translated into the African tongue-clicking language Xhosa -- at a community center in Khayelitsha. Then it was screened in townships across the country at less than a third of the price of a normal movie ticket.

In South Africa, the continent’s economic powerhouse that is driving its much-vaunted movie revival, the sprawling black townships on the edge of the big cities have virtually no theaters.

Transport links to the posher suburbs, whose vast shopping malls are home to almost all the country’s movie theaters, are poor, and despite a recent price war among theater chains, tickets are still costly by local standards.

Just out of film school, Ryan Thwaits, 25, was tired of tiny, mostly white, audiences and decided to create his own movie theaters by converting township shacks. At his pilot project in Khayelitsha, he lured 11,000 people a month to watch Hollywood action and romantic comedy mixed with local films, offering two shows a day at $1.55 each.

“The community loved it,” said Thwaits, who now hopes to roll out 10 more shack cinemas in the townships surrounding Cape Town by the end of the year. “It’s not that people in the townships don’t like cinema, it’s just that they can’t get there.”

But despite some impressive efforts to nurture local audiences, Africa still presents a Catch-22 for filmmakers.

“Yes, you’ve got to take the product to the people, but you can’t tackle distribution if you don’t have content. It’s like saying you’ve got great pubs with no beer,” said Garth Holmes, head of South Africa’s top film and drama school, AFDA.

Africa has recently produced some noteworthy films: “Yesterday,” an Oscar-nominated feature about a woman fighting HIV/AIDS in rural South Africa, “The Hero,” a winner at the Sundance festival about an Angolan war veteran, and “U-Carmen eKhayelitsha,” which took the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival this year.

And that is likely to continue, at least in South Africa, where a feature on Nelson Mandela by one of the country’s top filmmakers is in preproduction and the producers of “U-Carmen” are winding up a modern-day take on the life of Christ, billed as the first black Jesus film.

But experts say there needs to be greater emphasis on making the kinds of films more likely to develop a mass market.

“In Africa we have the tendency not to look at film as commercial but more on a social and political level,” Holmes said. “If we want to have an African film industry, we need to commodify it.”