23/08/2007 04:31 DAKAR, Aug 23 (AFP)
Senegal: DVDs dooming cinemas in Africa's filmmaking pioneer
Senegal's movie business, home of some of the continent's first black
filmmakers, is in the throes of crisis with cinema theaters downing
shutters as cheap and mostly pirated DVDs flood the markets.
Many cinema halls have been turned into warehouses for anything from
motor spare parts to cheap, imported Chinese trinkets hawked daily on
the streets in Dakar.
Others are rented on Sundays by pentecostal churches led mainly by
Nigerian nationals trying to make inroads in this predominantly
Muslim country.
"People no longer come to the cinema," said projectionist Amadou
Mamadou Ly, who works in Dakar's Liberte movie theatre, one of the
five remaining halls in the seaside capital.
"The DVDs have had an impact and the poor state of the halls" also
puts off movie-goers, he said.
"A football mat
ch shown on a giant screen attracts more people than a
movie," he said.
The same "movie" crisis is seen across Africa, but is all the more
surprising in this country that produced one of the continent's
leading filmmakers, Sembene Ousmane, who died recently.
The Senegalese were avid movie goers with a taste for American cowboy
films, Bollywood fare and cinema from France, the former colonial
power whose language is still the official tongue in this west
African state.
The country had 78 movie houses at the start of the 1980s but now
only 18 remain, according to the ministry of culture. Many of these
are decrepit, with broken seats, falling roof panels and situated in
areas that have gone down hill.
Twenty years ago the seaside capital Dakar had 40 film theatres.
Cinema halls have been closing across Africa for similar regions with
the notable exceptions of South Africa and Nigeria, which have
bo
oming national film industries, according to the Continental
monthly magazine.
"African film is in crisis and the closure of cinemas is only the
most visible sign," it said in an edition published during Africa's
premier film festival FESPACO held in Burkina Faso early this year.
In further signs of the worsening crisis, Dakar's most celebrated
movie house, the Paris, located near the central Independence Square,
was demolished two years ago.
A hotel and cinema complex are reportedly supposed to be built on the
site but construction has not started yet.
The 'El Mansour' movie hall in the working class suburb of Grand-
Dakar is now a garbage dump.
Vendors of pirated DVD films are meanwhile laughing all the way to
the bank selling each film for about four dollars (three euros) or
renting them out for a dollar for two days.
Most of the pirated movies are foreign and the country's film
industry h
as also felt the repercussions.
Senegal produced some of Africa's leading film makers such as
Ousmane, considered to be a "lighthouse" of African cinema.
But its film sector, which received generous state support from the
government during the rule of the country's founding leader, the late
Leopold Sedar Senghor, saw that backing start to evaporate when the
poet-president retired in 1980.
The state now issues between 60 and 70 filming permits every year and
more than half this number of films are actually produced.
"But these films (short and long features and documentaries) are
screened more outside the country," according to the director of
cinematography in the culture ministry, Amadou Tidiane Niagane.
After receiving state backing in the post-independence 1970s,
producers, directors and distributors have largely had to fend for
themselves since the 1990s, when the government cut funding due to
pr
essure from global lenders.
"We were misled by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) which recommended privatisation of the cinema," in the 1980s,
said the president of the association of Senegalese script writers,
Sheik Ngaido Ba.
"It is the worst privatisation we have ever seen in Senegal."
With little funding, few to no cinema schools and a poverty-struck
public, African filmmakers now have to look abroad for support.
A 4.5 million euro fund promised to the film industry early this year
in the form of a grant has yet to materialise.
_______________________________________________
Ugandanet mailing list
Ugandanet@kym.net
http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/ugandanet
% UGANDANET is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/
The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including
attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way.
---------------------------------------