South African Cinema 1896-2010

South African Cinema

This book is dedicated to Leon Van der Merwe, a soul mate for more than 30 years, and Hubert Dethier, a great scholar, humanist and friend.

South African Cinema

1896–2010

Martin Botha

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2012 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2012 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Sarah Newman

Copy-editor: Macmillan

Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-458-2

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1:Early South African cinema: 1895–1948

Chapter 2:A few liberal voices in the 1950s

Chapter 3:Pierre de Wet, Jamie Uys and Afrikaans cinema in the 1950s and 1960s

Chapter 4:Jans Rautenbach

Chapter 5:Manie Van Rensburg

Chapter 6:Ross Devenish

Chapter 7:B Scheme films

Chapter 8:The voices of the 1980s

Chapter 9:Oppositional film-making in the 1980s

Chapter 10:Attempts to create a national film commission

Chapter 11:Post-apartheid cinema

Chapter 12:Themes and aesthetics of post-apartheid cinema

Bibliography

Filmography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination and consolidation of 30 years of my own personal research into the South African film industry, from my post-graduate studies to professional research at the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa and film projects at the University of Cape Town. This book is also a product of the African Cinema Unit (ACU) at the University of Cape Town. The ACU is committed to promoting the study of African Cinemas, taking account of the richness and diversity of the film cultures that have emerged from the countries that make up this vast and complex continent.

Since 1988 I have been involved in the South African film industry in a multiplicity of roles. From 1990 to 1992 I was involved in extensive research for the Film and Allied Workers’ Organisation (FAWO) regarding the restructuring of the South African film industry. For this project I studied the film industries of Canada, New Zealand, West Africa, Iceland, Australia, Germany and Italy. From 1993 to 1995 further studies were conducted into the film industries of China, France, Great Britain, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Cuba. I worked closely with the Film and Television Federation on the establishment of a South African Film Foundation for the administration and funding of the local film industry. During April and May 1995 I was co-opted onto the Film Subcommittee of the new democratic government’s Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology’s Task Group regarding post-apartheid film policy. At the end of July 1995 I was seconded to the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology to co-write the white paper for a future South African film industry. The draft was completed at the beginning of 1996.

I had also the opportunity to serve as a council member of the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa (between 1999 and 2007), a sub-committee member of the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) regarding the establishment of a National Film School and a director (representing the NFVF and formal training institutions) of the Cape Film Commission (1999–2003). I was also a board member of the Community Video Education Trust in Cape Town, a community-based training institution. These roles provided me with an insider’s perspective on the film industry of South Africa. The monograph has also been enhanced by personal diaries with entries on more than 9000 films, including many South African films, which I wrote between 1975 and 2010.

During the past three decades numerous people had an impact on my research into South African cinema. On the academic side Prof. Hubert Dethier from Belgium, with whom I coauthored a book on the late South African director Manie Van Rensburg, has been a great colleague and friend for more than 18 years. On the side of film critics the late William Pretorius’s essays and reviews on South African and world cinema, as well as our lengthy conversations, remain a great source of inspiration. I am also deeply indebted to Prof. Pieter Fourie, Braam Muller, Johan Blignaut, Jans Rautenbach, Ross Devenish, Tobie Cronjé, Lionel Ngakane, Louis du Toit, Regardt Van den Bergh, Manie Van Rensburg, Lucia Saks, Ricardo Peach, Moonyeen Lee, Katinka Heyns, Zulfah Otto-Sallies, Jacky Lourens, Mike Dearham, Adri Van Aswegen, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, Gerhard Uys and Keyan Tomaselli for discussions on South African cinema during the past two decades.

Considerable assistance was given to me by innumerable film industry professionals, academics and other individuals, and while it is impossible to mention them all individually, I am particularly indebted to Prof. Jan Uhde, Grant Appleton, Evert Lombaert, Damon and Craig Foster, Michael Auret, Steven Markowitz, Richard Green, Ross Garland, Jeremy Nathan, Johan Nel, Regardt Van den Berg, Peter and Zaria Lamberti, Garth Meyer, Jason Xenopoulos, Inger Smith, Bryan Little, Harold Holscher, Gustav Kuhn, Minky Schlesinger, Thabang Moleya, Neil Brandt, Francois Verster, John Warner, Pierre Crocquet, Hein Devos, Nilesh Singh, Helena Spring, Paul Raleigh, Monica Keys, Douw Jordaan, Tim Greene, Freddy and Sue Ogterop, Trevor Moses, M-Net’s Jan du Plessis and Bonolo Modisakwane, Ingrid Thomson, Kenneth Kaplan, Oliver Schmitz, Julie Frederikse, Dirk de Villiers, Grethe Fox, Marina Bekker, Wilma Stockenström, Roy Armes, José Gatti, Angela Van Schalkwyk, Michael Rogosin, Johan de Lange, Darrell Roodt, Trevor Steele Taylor, Aryan Kaganof and Oscar Phasha.

I have been continuously indebted to Leon Van der Merwe for sustained encouragement regarding my career.

I would also like to thank Braam Muller for his invaluable input as copy-editor of the revised manuscript and Jelena Stanovnik from Intellect Publishers for her encouraging words to ensure that the final book is as strong as possible.

I wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Ian Glenn and Prof. Paula Ensor from the University of Cape Town for the opportunity to take research leave and finish this book.

Many individuals and organizations provided stills. In particular I would like to thank M-Net, kykNET and the African Film Library for their major contribution.

Introduction

Although 1994 saw the birth of democracy in South Africa, the South African film industry is much older; in fact, its great documentary film tradition dates back to 1896 as well as the Anglo-Boer War or South African War. Surprisingly only a few books have been published regarding the history of one of the oldest film industries in the world and one of the largest in the African continent. Between 1910 and 2008 as many as 1434 features were made in South Africa (Armes 2008). The majority, 944 features, were shot in the short period between 1978 and 1992 (Blignaut & Botha 1992).

South African film history is captured in a mere 13 books. Developments in early South African cinema (1895–1940) have been chronicled in Thelma Gutsche’s The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa: 1895–1940 (1946/72). Other significant studies include Keyan Tomaselli’s The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South Africa (1989), Johan Blignaut and Martin Botha’s Movies Moguls Mavericks: South African Cinema 1979–1991 (1992), Martin Botha’s edited volume, Marginal Lives and Painful Pasts: South African Cinema After Apartheid (2007), Jacqueline Maingard’s South African National Cinema (2007), André le Roux and Lilla Fourie’s Filmverlede: Geskiedenis van die Suid-Afrikaanse speelfilm (1982), Peter Davis’s In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa (1996), Martin Botha and Adri Van Aswegen’s Images of South Africa: The Rise of the Alternative film (1992), Tomaselli’s compilation of revised and reworked papers and chapters published elsewhere, Encountering Modernity: Twentieth Century South African Cinemas (2006), Isabel Balseiro and Ntongela Masilela’s edited volume, To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa (2003) as well as Lucia Saks’s Cinema in a Democratic South Africa: The Race for Representation (2010).

In the 113-year history of South African cinema only two books have been devoted to South African film directors: Martin Botha and Hubert Dethier’s Kronieken van Zuid-Afrika: de films van Manie van Rensburg (1997) and Martin Botha’s Jans Rautenbach: Dromer Baanbreker en Auteur (2006c). Veteran directors such as Jans Rautenbach (Jannie Totsiens, 1970), Ross Devenish (Marigolds in August, 1979), Manie Van Rensburg (The Fourth Reich, 1990) and the younger generation of the 1980s challenged moral and political censorship during apartheid, a severe lack of audience development and inadequate film distribution to shape progressive texts, which became the foundation of a new, critical South African cinema during the 1990s.

Even after several decades Gutsche’s book (1972) remains a pioneering study and virtually the only reference for all studies dealing with early South African film history (1895–1940). Gutsche examined the social, cultural, economic and political history of early South African cinema as well as some of the significant technological advances.¹ Gutsche, however, approached the production of South African cinema as a historian of social and cultural institutions, rather than a film historian of artistic processes or from a concern with aesthetics of form.

Although producing significant studies on the representation of class and/or race in South African cinema, scholars such as Tomaselli (1989), Davis (1996) as well as Balseiro and Masilela (2003) were also more occupied with the social, cultural, economic and political histories of South African cinema before and during the apartheid years than artistic processes. As a result the artistic achievements of film directors, cinematographers, actors, art directors, composers, editors and other members of the production teams received little scholarly attention.

Recent attempts to rework the history of South African cinema such as Isabel Balseiro and Ntongela Masilela’s edited volume, To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa (2003) as well as Jacqueline Maingard’s South African National Cinema (2007) devoted entire chapters to the ideological analysis of films such as De Voortrekkers (1916), Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) and Come Back, Africa (1959), but in the process they ignored the significant oeuvres of directors such as Ross Devenish, Manie van Rensburg, Jans Rautenbach, Katinka Heyns and Darrell Roodt as well as many of the directors of the 1980s. Surprisingly Heyns and Roodt, and other significant (and internationally acclaimed) post-apartheid directors such as Gavin Hood, Mark Dornford-May, Rehad Desai, Francois Verster, Ramadan Suleman, Madoda Ncayiyana, Craig Matthew, Craig and Damon Foster, Jack Lewis, Liz Fish and Ntshaveni Wa Luruli, are absent from the list of 25 film-makers and cultural leaders whom the American scholar Audrey Thomas McCluskey interviewed for her recent publication on post-apartheid cinema titled The Devil You Dance With: Film Culture in the New South Africa (2009).

Cry, the Beloved Country. Videovision

The exciting revival of short-film-making in South African cinema since the 1980s has also received little attention by academic scholars. Among the above-mentioned books on South African film history only Botha (2007) and Maingard (2007: 157–66) focused on this very significant development in post-apartheid South African cinema. Hundreds of short fiction and non-fiction films have been made in South Africa since 1980. The themes of most of these films were initially limited to anti-apartheid texts, which were instruments in the anti-apartheid struggle (Botha 2009). During the late 1980s and early 1990s short-filmmakers have also explored themes other than apartheid, for example, equal rights for gay and lesbian South Africans. Many short-film-makers have since 1994 experimented with form and aesthetics as well as various narrative structures, including oral storytelling. Future studies of post-apartheid cinema need to take the revival of short-film-making in South Africa into account. Exciting directorial voices such as Garth Meyer, Dumisani Phakhati, Willem Grobler, Teboho Mahlatsi, Justin Puren, Inger Smith, Johan Nel, Nina Mnaya and John Warner hold immense promise for future feature film-making in post-apartheid South Africa.

Among the decades of film escapism, racist films and government propaganda, South African cinema produced cinematic jewels. This monograph is an attempt to describe, contextualize and analyse the aesthetic highlights of South African cinema from 1896 to 2010 by focusing on the use of film form, style and genre.

Chapter 1 briefly chronicles the early history of South African cinema. Early projection devices were used around the Johannesburg goldfields from 1895 onwards. The first ever newsreels were filmed at the front during the Anglo-Boer War (1889–1902). As many as 43 films of good technical quality were made between 1916 and 1922 by I.W. Schlesinger’s company, African Film Productions Ltd. In the 1930s the company was also responsible for features with sound, including the first Afrikaans-language productions. Schlesinger, however, was unable to secure a foothold in either the British or US markets for the screening of South African films.

Chapter 2 deals with a few independent British and American film-makers, such as Eric Rutherford, Donald Swanson and Lionel Rogoson, who attempted to make films about the black majority in apartheid South Africa. Film production, however, was still dominated by Schlesinger. A 30-year lull was broken in the 1950s by Jamie Uys, who succeeded in attracting Afrikaner-dominated capital for independent production. He was instrumental in persuading the Afrikaner Nationalist Party government to provide a subsidy for the making of local films. Indirectly this step led to the severe fragmentation of the country’s film industry, the topic of Chapter 3.

In a nutshell, one could say that the apartheid policy together with the ineffective state-subsidized film structures contributed to the severe fragmentation of the South African film industry in the 1960s (Nathan 1991; Tomaselli 1989). Since 1956, when a regulated subsidy system was introduced, government and big businesses have collaborated to manipulate cinema in South Africa. Ideology and capital came together to create a national cinema that would reflect South Africa during the Verwoerdian regime of the 1960s. However, it was initially a cinema for whites only and predominantly Afrikaans. The white Afrikaans audience for the local cinema was relatively large and very stable, guaranteeing nearly every Afrikaans film a long enough run to break-even as long as it provided light entertainment and dealt with Afrikaner reality and beliefs (Davies 1989; Tomaselli 1989).

But for a few exceptions, the films were unremarkable. Fourie (1981) attributes this to the conservative attitude of contemporary Afrikaners towards the films. Afrikaners wanted their ideals visualized in these films. This idealistic conservatism was characterized by an attachment to the past, to ideals of linguistic and racial purity and to religious and moral norms. Homosexuality, for example, had no place in this world view. The films had to subscribe to these conservative and homophobic norms in order to be successful at the box office. The films seldom attempted to explore a national cultural psyche. As such, they were a closed form, made by Afrikaners for Afrikaners, with little or no attention to their potential to say something important about their society to an international audience. The type of realism that could have analyzed Afrikaner culture in a critical manner was avoided. Instead folk stereotypes that showed the Afrikaner as chatty, heart-warming and lovable in a comedy tradition, or as beset by emotional problems that had little to do with society but much to do with the mainsprings of western melodrama about mismatched couples overcoming obstacles on the path to true love, were employed (Blignaut & Botha 1992).

The films by Jans Rautenbach and Emil Nofal, namely Die Kandidaat, Katrina and Jannie Totsiens, were successful alternatives to the numerous Afrikaans escapism fare of the 1960s and early 1970s (Botha & Van Aswegen 1992). After the introduction of South African television in 1976, some Afrikaans film-makers such as Manie Van Rensburg made brilliant dramas and series for local television. In fact, Van Rensburg became a chronicler of the Afrikaner psyche in revisionist dramas such as Verspeelde Lente, The Fourth Reich and Die Perdesmous. The oeuvre of Rautenbach is discussed in Chapter 4, and the impressive work by Van Rensburg is examined in Chapter 5. The attempts of director Ross Devenish to make meaningful films about the socio-political realities of South Africa during the 1970s are analyzed in Chapter 6.

Another contributor to the fragmentation of South African film industry was the creation of a so-called Bantu film industry during the 1970s. This boost to films for black South Africans resulted in the making of a large number of shoddy films in Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa and other South African languages, and these films were screened in churches, schools and community and beer halls. It was contrary to government policy to allow black cinemas in the urban white areas, as this would have been tantamount to conceding citizenship to urban blacks. The urbanization of blacks was portrayed as uniformly negative and homeland life as more fitting (Gavshon 1983; Van Zyl 1985). At this stage, black and white audiences were treated differently. Audiences were separated each with its own set of rules and operations, films and cinemas. Any film that managed to be made reflecting in any way the South African society in turmoil was banned by the state, or received no distribution whatsoever, and thus did not qualify for any film subsidy. A true national film industry did not, therefore, develop through the Bantu film industry – only a few inferior paternalistic films for blacks were made, chiefly by whites. These developments are briefly discussed in Chapter 7.

During the mid-1980s the industry was further fragmented. By means of substantial tax concessions that made investing in film an attractive option, a boom occurred in the commercial industry (Accone 1990a; 1990b; Blignaut & Botha 1992; Powell 1990; Schoombie 1990; Silber 1990a; 1990b). Several hundred films were made, mostly inferior imitations of American genre films (Blignaut & Botha 1992). The majority of these tax-shelter films did not reflect any recognizable socio-political reality. At the end of the 1980s, the tax-shelter scheme collapsed and this industry was virtually wiped out. Developments during the 1980s are discussed in Chapters 8 and 9.

The history of film distribution in South Africa has sadly been one of racism and segregation (Tomaselli 1989). Only in 1985 did the distributors manage to desegregate some cinemas, and for the first time the existence and importance of the majority of South Africans, deprived both socially and economically of the chance to be part of a cinema-going public, were acknowledged.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s a group of film and video producers who were not affiliated to the established film companies in the mainstream industry made films about the realities of the majority of South Africans (Botha & Van Aswegen 1992). Most of these were shown at film festivals, universities, church halls, trade union offices and in private homes of interested parties. The majority of the films experienced censorship problems during the state of emergency. The films had small budgets and were either financed by the producers themselves, by progressive organizations or with the assistance of the tax-benefit system of the 1980s (Tomaselli 1989). The films were chiefly the product of two groups that emerged jointly: a group of white university students opposed to apartheid and black workers who yearned for a film form using indigenous imagery that would portray their reality in South Africa and would give them a voice and space in local films. Chapter 9 examines some of these features and documentaries.

This remarkable process led to a mass movement of workers, students and members of youth, sport and church organizations who united in their opposition to apartheid. It also contributed to the formation of the Film and Allied Workers’ Organisation (FAWO) in September 1988. One of the aims of FAWO was to unite all film-makers within South Africa to establish a democratic society (Currie 1989; Metz 1990).

Together with numerous documentaries, community videos and the rise of short fiction and animation film-making, full-length films such as Mapantsula marked the beginning of a new, critical South African cinema. Botha and Van Aswegen (1992) referred to this cinema as the alternative film movement of the 1980s. It is evident that this new cinema is based on audio-visual material that reflects the realities of the black majority. It constitutes a valid part of South Africa’s national film industry. It is from these films that the symbols and iconography of a national film industry can be drawn, rather than from the diversions produced by the Afrikaans-language cinema of the 1970s, the Bantu film industry and the tax-shelter films discussed in Chapters 3 and 7.

An estimated 944 features were shot between 1979 and 1992 as well as nearly 998 documentaries and hundreds of short films and videos (Blignaut & Botha 1992). Although most of the features were of mediocre value, at least 20 remarkable local feature films were made. They included Mapantsula (which participated in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival), Marigolds in August (a winner of two Silver Bears at Berlinale), On the Wire, the brilliant The Road to Mecca (which was highly applauded at film festivals in India and Canada), the interracial drama Saturday Night at the Palace, the Mannheim Jury prize winner Shotdown, the evocative Afrikaans dramas Fiela se Kind and Die Storie van Klara Viljee, Manie Van Rensburg’s 4-hour director’s cut of The Fourth Reich about Afrikaner nationalism and the Darrell Roodt trilogy (Place of Weeping, The Stick and Jobman). In the 1990s co-productions led to six local films receiving international attention: Darrell Roodt’s Sarafina! and Cry, the Beloved Country; Elaine Proctor’s Friends; Les Blair’s Jump the Gun; Shyam Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma; and Katinka Heyns’s Paljas.

Although apartheid was officially still in place during the making of films such as Mapantsula, Jobman, On the Wire and The Stick, these features, together with numerous community and resistance videos, became vital instruments in the anti-apartheid struggle. The exhibition and distribution of these films, especially the community videos and documentaries on the evils of apartheid were one great problem area. Mapantsula and The Stick, for example, were only unbanned after 1990, and Jobman has still not been commercially released in South Africa. Most of these films were screened at alternative venues like community halls, churches in the townships, selected progressive film festivals and even private homes.

These films can be described as progressive film texts in the sense that all of them are consciously critical of apartheid, either in a historical (Fiela se Kind, Jobman) or a more contemporary context (the South Africa of the 1980s in Mapantsula). They deal with the lives and struggle of people in a developing country and are mostly allied with the liberation movements for a non-racial South Africa.

Mapantsula is an example of local film-making that represents a voice of resistance, which echoes in the popular culture, and memory of the majority of South Africans. The existence and experience of township life was severely censored and withheld from the media before 1990. The workings of the Publication Control Act, coupled with the state of emergency and the regulations accompanying it, were just two of the more obvious means to achieve this media silence. Features such as Mapantsula, Jobman and On the Wire were a critical and necessary intervention in the representation of this usually hidden reality on South African screens. These films, like the short film Come See the Bioscope, try to recover popular memory. They deal with events which were conveniently left out in official South African history books or in a contemporary context in actuality programmes on national television. Therefore, they became guardians of popular memory within the socio-political process in South Africa.

A positive development during the early 1990s was the perception from all sectors of the South African film industry that cinema has a vital role to play in the forging of social cohesion and the process of democratization and development that so urgently needs to take place. In 1991 the Film and Broadcasting Forum (FBF) was established to address the challenges faced by the film industry. It was widely considered to be an important step in the consultation process that resulted in the creation of a single body during 1993, motivated by mutual interests. In composition, the FBF represented the widest possible cross-section of industry interests, from producers to directors, writers, actors, musicians, technicians, agents, managements and studios. It also included both progressive and more establishment-oriented groupings, some of which have hitherto not been overly co-operative. The creation of an environment in which its members could address strategic issues of common interest and discuss such strategies with the state, political parties, cultural groups, broadcasters, distributors, exhibitors and others was the FBF’s prime objective. The main aim was the establishment and development of a representative South African film culture which would redress the political imbalance of the past to ensure equal access to film structures for all South Africans. From this consultative process, an interim consensus document emerged, which tried to address the restructuring of the local film industry.

This resulted in the creation of the Film and Broadcasting Steering Committee, in 1993, representing the eight major film organizations in local cinema. The Film and Broadcasting Steering Committee painstakingly worked on proposals for a South African Film Foundation for more than a year. The proposed structures were modelled on the French film structures in France and Burkina Faso. By mid-1994 the Film and Television Federation emerged from the Broadcasting and Film Steering Committee. This process is discussed in Chapter 10.

Another important development was the historic democratic elections of 1994. The year 1994 could also be regarded as a landmark for the South African film industry. A comprehensive study by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) on the restructuring of the entire South African film industry was completed and forwarded to the newly formed Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST; see Botha et al. 1994). The 400-page report received widespread praise throughout the local film and television industry. The HSRC research team recommended that state aid to the local film industry should be administered by a statutory body referred to as the South African Film and Video Foundation (SAFVF). Commercial viability should not be the sole criterion for government support of locally made films. All types of films, including short films, should benefit, and a developmental fund should be used to support first-time film-makers from previously marginalized communities. A government-appointed task group extensively used this report in 1995 to draft the white paper regarding a post-apartheid film industry. The white paper was completed by 1996, and the National Film and Video Foundation Bill was accepted by the South African Parliament in 1997.

Chapters 11 and 12 focus on developments in post-apartheid cinema. Post-apartheid cinema in general is characterized by the emergence of new voices and a diversification of themes. The monograph concludes with the challenges faced by the South African film industry. Thanks to digital technology the post-apartheid cinema is currently enjoying a revival and substantial international acclaim. The industry, however, also faces major challenges. Despite the establishment of the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), local film-makers are still struggling to find funding for their work and, in many cases, an audience for their films.

A film industry or, in more ambitious terms, a national cinema is ultimately dependent on the number of people who are willing to pay for it. Without a paying audience, whether it is cinema, television, video or new media exhibition, there can be no industry to speak of. With a total population of approximately 49 million people South Africa has a tiny cinema-going audience, measured at approximately 5 million persons with a rapidly growing television-consuming public penetrating approximately 49% of the total number of South African households.

Audience development will become more and more crucial to build audiences for the post-apartheid cinema. South Africa’s film industry has been held to ransom for decades by the developed markets’ funding and exhibition models, content and distribution strengths and worldwide dominance of the Hollywood studios. It has been estimated that Hollywood product dominates 99% of screen time in South African cinemas. Local film-makers have to compete with films by independent American, British and Australian film-makers as well as films from the Middle East and Asia for the remaining 1%.

Other challenges facing the South African film industry are the inaccessible film exhibition sites that are outside the reach of the majority of South Africans, the limited concentration of theatres in metropolitan areas and the general lack of culturally