21 January 2020 - 16:50It’s been another sunny SA Christmas, with more fun-for-the-whole-family cinema releases for the holidays that do insanely well at the box office. In the US, holiday releases play out in the same, spend-crazy way. It’s a formula. It works. Like Black Friday and, well, Christmas. Everywhere.
The SA film industry is mature. It’s more than frenetic foot traffic past a box office and into a cinema for a feature. It includes made-for-television films, short films, documentaries, episodic and reality television, and game shows. It also supports local and extensive foreign commercial shoots. Until recently, the SABC was the single biggest buyer of local content in the country. It’s now MultiChoice.
The basic underlying problem local films face cannot be solved by a parallel cinematic universe of theatres with content for “the majority of South Africans”; Hlaudi Motsoeneng tried that with radio and it undid the SABC. As with SA venture capital companies that are rare and often struggle to grasp the nuances of start-ups, there aren’t sophisticated funders who understand film. It’s a supply-side issue — precisely the business of production .