Durban FilmMart 2: Production Challenges in South Africa – Content and Commerce

The Durban FilmMart’s documentary section showcased eight non-fiction African films in development. A dynamic and diverse lineup of documentarians delivered short pitches and then received feedback from representatives of South African production companies and foreign funding agencies  (including ITVS, IDFA, Hot Docs, and the Tribeca Institute). Three outstanding projects from the Talent Campus Durban were chosen to join the eight official doc forum participants and give their pitches. After the market I caught up with one of these emerging directors, South African filmmaker Maanda Ntsandeni, to talk about his film Parole Camp and some of the challenges of filmmaking in his country.

Parole Camp follows three characters in an alternatives-to-incarceration program called REALISTIC and was born of a very personal experience of Maanda’s: “I had a friend who went to jail when he was 18. He got out, and his friends - including me – turned their backs on him. The next day he committed suicide.” REALISTIC supports young people during their time immediately following their release.

According to Maanda, “it’s very difficult to finance a documentary like Parole Camp, simply because people are prejudiced against ex-inmates, for a lot of reasons -- one which may be that they want to continue seeing them punished, despite whatever time they’ve served inside. No one believed in this project from the very onset… I applied though various funds, (but) I think they just couldn’t understand what I was trying to do. Until I applied to the NFVF (National Film and Video Foundation). They took a chance.”

South Africa’s NFVF provides grants and loans to South African Filmmakers at different stages: education and training, development, production, and marketing and distribution. They also have other initiatives aimed at fostering local industry, including the Sediba Spark Scriptwriting Programs.

Maanda Ntsandeni received a development grant of US $10,000 last year, which allowed him to shoot and cut a work-in-progress and trailer that he presented at Durban. The Parole Camp trailer and pitch earned Maanda a further development grant of €2,500 from Worldview.

In addition to the challenges posed by his subject matter, Maanda contends that persistent racial prejudice and a lingering old boys’ club mentality in the South African film industry create other barriers for young black filmmakers. Among other things, black filmmakers can have a much harder time securing equipment than their white counterparts – a real obstacle for unestablished producers, since rentals in SA can be expensive and grant monies are often not allowed to be spent on equipment purchase. Furthermore, according to Maanda, there is a relative lack of creative cooperation between South Africa and other African countries – in part because the South African industry is seen by many other Africans as a European industry. (Countries in Francophone West Africa, by contrast, have a stronger tradition of cross-border collaboration and creative germination. More on potential connections between African countries to come in future blogs).

Maanda, who was mentored by veteran producer Neil Brandt, is now seeking a partnership with a U.S. Producer so that he can open a Kickstarter campaign. Winning the Worldview grant, a project of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, may open doors to other funders in the UK for this project.

Whatever route it takes, Parole Camp is a documentary with heart that is likely to find financial support and an audience.

Crowdfunding - Patronage or Purchase?

I recently attended two great Aspen Institute events that dealt with society’s investment in the arts.

The first, entitled “What Are We Worth?: Shakespeare, Money, and Morals” combined Shakespearean monologues about money – performed by Matt Damon and Alan Alda, among others – with a town-hall style discussion led by Harvard professor and social philosopher Michael Sandel. The crux of Sandel’s argument is that while marketplaces are a necessary part of society, there are certain things that should be excluded from and protected from market forces. Up for debate was the question of whether arts should be among these. (A question that would, on average, be answered very differently in Paris than it would in Hollywood).

In thinking about the future of the Co-Production, I’m considering different types of film economies and their relationship to the global marketplace. One broad trend I anticipate is that there will be increasingly greater collaborations between private and public money the world over. Financing for the arts -- especially expensive arts like moviemaking -- will be subjected to the marketplace of audiences’ ideas and tastes. But films will also continue to be partially shielded from the marketplace by the patronage of those who are willing to pay for their existence without expecting financial gain in return.

So where does crowdfuding fit into all this?

Several CRI posts by the Grassroots Distribution team have dealt with the game-changing nature of crowdfunding – addressing the benefits of gift economies and the donor-versus-investor paradigm shift that many see occurring.

This brings me to the second Aspen Institute event, a discussion on “Democratizing the Arts” with Yancey Strickler of Kickstarter and Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org.

One of the things that struck me during this discussion was the blurring of lines between Non-Profit and For-Profit entities that has seemingly emerged with crowdfunding.  DonorsChoose.org, a Non-Profit that channels funds to specific need requests posted by teachers, functions very much the same way as (the For-Profit company) Kickstarter.com.  Both platforms facilitate the actualization of something that the audience/donor would like to see exist in the world.

Neither of these offer a financial return on investment for the donor, but they do both offer an assurance that by giving money, you are purchasing/funding the creation of a specific product or service. In the case of the now-ubiquitous rewards for Kickstarter Donors, you’re also likely pre-purchasing a DVD, digital download, or ticket to a screening of the film.

So is crowdfunding a movie patronage or purchase?  It seems to be both. And it’s an important question because mounting a crowdfuding campaign and mobilizing an audience’s participation (financial or otherwise) is now a prime directive of many producers.  For these projects, the relationship between the filmmaker and their audiences/customers/supporters is now exercised to a great degree in the fundraising stage.

Last year was the first in which money given to the arts through Kickstarter outpaced funding from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. It will be very interesting to see how the landscape has shifted by the time this benchmark is reached in a European country with a more collectivist, government funded film industry. But I’ve spoken recently with a number of European filmmakers working on first features who are foregoing the (stable and) traditional public funds of their home countries in favor of a more flexible crowdfunding base – which they believe allows for a quicker turnaround time and more artistic control.

Perhaps what is so promising about the future of filmmaking, and expensive artistic endeavors in general, is that the modern Medicis can be anywhere in the world. And an audience member of modest means can patronize your film and purchase it in advance – which in turn allows it to exist in the first place.

In the rosiest view of crowdfunding, it is indeed a new kind of marketplace – one in which return on investment means getting to see a film you wanted to be made.

Making Movies in France - The American Way

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Grad Film Alum Melanie Delloye’s thesis film Anna and Jerome, starring Élodie Bouchez, is a French road movie about a mother who doesn't have custody of her six-year-old son and decides to run off with him. Shot in Normandy, and taking full advantage of the geography of the province, this film eschewed traditional financing through France’s national and region­al film agencies. Instead, Melanie made use of a new feature of the French landscape – Crowdsourcing.

Melanie says: “We applied to a bunch of the regional grants, but we were told that in order to do it right we would have to wait a year to make sure that we met all the guichets [benchmarks]. We didn’t want to lose momentum so we decided to go ahead and make the film ‘the American Way.’”

Melanie and her producer Robin Robles raised funds through the crowdsourcing site Ulule, which accepts money in multiple currencies from inside and outside of France. Like Kickstarter, Ulule facilitates funding for a variety of projects (those currently featured on the site include film, photo, and music projects, and even an agricultural start-up).

According to Melanie: “It [crowdsourcing] is very new in France and a lot of people don’t really under­stand what it is. There isn’t even really a French word for it – we just say ‘crowdsourcing.’” To date just under 1,900 projects have been funded through Ulule – compared with over 38,000 funded on Kickstarter. And the goal of 14,000 Euros (about US $18,000) for Anna and Jerome was one of the larger amounts raised on the site – at least at the time.

The novelty of crowdsourcing in France had some benefits. Ulule was fully behind the project and fea­tured it in a number of ways (including a blog about Melanie as Ululer of the Week). Anna and Jerome also received a small amount of funding and other support from Daily Motion (the French equivalent of YouTube).

Melanie and Robin finally did get word from one of the regional film funds that they’d received a grant – but it came six months after Anna and Jerome was finished! (Most such grants require the production to take place within the specific region, province, or municipality, so it was moot.)

Productions that fall under  the guidelines of the Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée ( the 'CNC' - France's national film agency) also come with other rules, including minimum labor and benefit payments. Making Anna and Jerome outside the con­fines of that system allowed the production to function strictly as a student film, which gave more flexibility (Producer Robin Robles is a recent graduate of La FEMIS, the French state film school). So for a number of reasons, the decision to make the film ‘à l’américaine’ seems to have been a good choice.

Still, Melanie is not forsaking traditional French fund­ing methods. She is developing a feature film set in Colombia, for which she plans to find production financing within Colombia and also seek French co-production funds.

In future blogs I will discuss the Colombian film industry's new incentives system and other productions in development to be shot in that country.

Crowd Sourced Cinema... how we got here

This week, WIRED posted an article about the emerging phenomenon of crowd-sourced cinema. This trend seems to have emerged as a result of a confluence of factors, including:

(1) The digitization of the modern movie theater.  As studios has pushed back on exhibitors to outfit their facilities with digital projection technology, the requirement to create a 35mm print to play in a big house has fallen by the wayside. Digital theaters can now screen everything from DCPs to Blu-Rays, brining the cost of creating a screenable "print" from thousands to hundreds of dollars.

(2) Low weekday attendance at movie theaters.   There's a reason that the industry reports weekend box office rather than weekly box office. People go to the movies on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, leaving an opportunity for alternative revenue sources during the quiet weeks at the art houses and multiplexes. A model where theaters can show a movie without shouldering the risk makes a lot of sense.

(3) DIY. With Kickstarter and IndieGoGo filmmakers are raising capital themselves. And with the decreasing cost and increasing access to equipment, filmmakers have the ability to make films with more autonomy and creative control. For the entrepreneurial filmmaker, digital distribution and on-demand screenings offers an extension of this approach, affording artists the opportunity to control the distribution process, determine price and access, directly monetize a fan base or all of the above (see: Louis CK).

(4) The niche-ification of the independent film business.  As studio films get bigger, small films seem to be getting smaller (Sundance, SXSW and Tribeca have recently launched sections explicitly for micro-budget filmmakers).  Just as the music industry has seemed to transition from churning out overnight successes that could speak to most of us, to an array of middle class theater-playing acts that speak to few of us, the film industry may be headed in a direction where filmmakers grow and nurture smaller, but loyal audiences. Bring on the sub-genres.

Whether on-demand screenings are a new and legitimate alternative to traditional theatrical release, a marketing tool to help raise awareness and allow filmmakers to directly access (and monetize) their fans, a revolutionary approach to repertory cinema, or something in between, it's a fascinating development and one we should all have our eyes on as it continues to find its footing.