South African filmmaker and producer, Kutlwano Ditsele, takes pride in re-telling the African narrative in a way that empowers and represents the continent as progressive. There’s also always a twist in the plot. 



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“A Japanese man on holiday with his wife in South Africa falls in love with a…”



An incomplete idea is stored and filed away in the digital
pages of a smart phone. 



The author is not only a creative director but also the
co-founder of South African production company, Seriti Films. 



By merging his passion for celebrating African stories through film and television with entrepreneurship, Kutlwano Ditsele’s story is on its way to a happy ending. 



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He debuted his career as a filmmaker with a music video for
South African mega-star AKA in 2010, shot in the heart of Johannesburg’s
Central Business District.



The initial production cost was a humble R20,000
($1,360).&nbsp; 



A serendipitous bicycle race on a Sunday afternoon saved
them from paying heavily to close off certain main roads and public areas
downtown, during the filming of the music video. 



Ditsele recalls the silence and how the emptiness edified
the aesthetics of AKA’s song, Victory Lap. 



An artist owning the streets of the country’s economic and
financial hub for a day, even if it is by chance, opened a world of
opportunities for Ditsele, who was propeled into the limelight after the video.




Today, ideas constantly fall on his lap, even when he is on
the move. 



As he scrolls through his phone, he stumbles upon a
never-ending list of ideas he forgot existed (such as the one at the beginning
of this story). With surprise, he recites various plot lines. 



“Crime family show, three sisters and a kid brother with a grandmother… Whenever I am on a train, plane, car or even a jog, a small idea will come into my head,” he says.  



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Kutlwano’s relationship with film goes back to when he was
eight years old; setting up a make-shift cinema for his cousins at their family
home in the mountainous parts of Rustenburg, in the North West province. 



Despite limited resources (television and electricity), what
little exposure they had to the enchanting effect of those screens would
inspire the young Ditsele and his cousins to re-enact those scenes, with him
assuming the role of the director. 



“Your responsibility is for that single mother who wakes up
at 4 o’clock in the morning, who has to get water outside, boil that water, get
the kids’ food ready, get on a train for an hour or two to be the first to get
into the office and having to leave at three or four o’clock, to sit in front
of the television at eight in the evening, to forget about her problems for the
hour,” he says. 



Intellectual property is a commodity in the local film
industry that leaves filmmakers like Ditsele working twice as hard to build a
name and fix the misrepresentations that were previously normalized before
African filmmakers had the means of production. Globally, the industry has
created more opportunities for black filmmakers. 



In 2005, Ditsele was awarded the opportunity to study at the
New York Film Academy. 



The cultural exchanges he shared with students from
Singapore, Indonesia, China and Brazil taught him that filmmaking is not only
about learning in class but exploring one’s environment. 



Learning in Hollywood placed him in a privileged position when he returned to South Africa in 2008. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> “Your responsibility is for that single mother who wakes up at 4 o’clock&#8230;to forget about her problems for the hour.” </blockquote>



He took it upon himself to re-tell the African narrative by
documenting positive representations of the continent. However, this becomes a tightrope
walk for local film producers who need to ensure their work has commercial
appeal. 



A contemporary challenge is that story-tellers, like
Ditsele, have to compete for a seat in the mainstream industry.



“It is more about the African narrative other than just the
South African narrative. I think that it is hard for us to ignore that the
biggest propaganda machine, America, is in the films. How we view America is
from everything they have done. 



“Aliens are coming, and America will save them (humans). They have told this incredible narrative about themselves and it has gone out into the world. The narrative around Africa has been quite the opposite. A narrative of poverty, jungle, primitive and they keep telling that narrative and they shy away from progressive stories,” he says. 



The filmmaker highlights that although the local industry
developed over the last 25 years, the number of those waiting in line remains
high, and those who fortuitously manage to float to the top and become brands
are few and far between.&nbsp; 



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Despite being behind the camera, Distele says there are
industry inhibitors that prevent creatives from owning their intellectual
property. 



In a bitter twist of irony, many local stars who are
celebrated far and wide will die without a cent to their name to the extent
that their families are forced to crowdfund for burial costs.



“What you create is owned by someone else and they can make
as much money as they want. I think it is wrong because Picasso should decide
how much his painting is worth, not somebody else,” he says.



A simple idea, like the 2018 South African Film and
Television Awards (SAFTA)-nominated production, The Herd, achieved immense
commercial success as the story lines are often merged with the topical issues
of the day.&nbsp; 



For Distele, South African productions about love, power and
wealth are an example of how the production company keeps the African narrative
relatable to all viewers. For instance, the plot twist of a young girl thrust
into power in a modern world; cultural ceremonies are portrayed in a way that
the millennial audience can immerse themselves in.



The proliferation of social media and digitalization has
given the audience agency to comment in real time and engage and be critical of
the content given to them and directors like Ditsele are paying close
attention.

KutwanaD_GL

Owning The African Narrative

It takes a lot of passion and persistence to make a film in Africa. Very few succeed; many more fall by the wayside in a tough game.
Carolyn Carew, CEO and executive producer of Born Free Media (BFM), is one of the survivors with 25 hard years in the film business. It has been a lifelong love affair with film, which began when she was a child.
“We’d put up a little white sheet in the sitting room and watch movies on our 16mm projector. Around the World in 80 Days and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were among my favorite movies. We also had a local cinema in Krugersdorp, where I grew up, called the Vordet, and we used to go there every Saturday—it was like an outing for all the girls and boys.”
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Carew’s path into working in movies was more difficult. She left the University of Cape Town with a post-graduate degree and worked for 10 months as a social worker. Through her sister, Carew snuck into the film industry in 1987, as a driver on a film called African Farm.
“I would also observe on set what the first and second assistant directors did; and from there I went and applied for other jobs. I then worked as an assistant director for a few years—and that’s basically how I got in,” she says.
Carew is now established, but life on set is far from easy.
“SA is one of those countries on the continent where you get the patriarchal attitude. I think sometimes people don’t really like to take advice or take direction from a woman—so that can be quite challenging. For me it wasn’t so much the gender issue that was challenging, but the amount of hours. When I look back on my 25-year career, I think I’ve worked an average of 14 to 15 hours a day, a good six to seven days a week. It’s been an incredible commitment that one has had to put into it. SA’s has got a competitive edge; we’ve got very good crews here, very good locations and we’ve got very good equipment. On average per year, we service at least 10 to 15 feature films—big ones; and about five or six co-productions,” she says.
Money remains the industry’s greatest problem.
“It would be the most amazing thing if we could get local individuals, people who have money and want to invest in cinema, to invest in the film industry. I think a lot of the time, the risks can outweigh the profits, so people don’t really want to invest in film. It’s quite a challenge,” says Carew.
Taking advantage of the Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) relationship is another way to build and grow SA’s film industry, Carew says. South Africa already has a co-production treaty with India, but not with China and Brazil. “I think if we could find a way even within those four countries to exploit our content, we’d be able to achieve a lot because therein lies a huge industry.”
She reckons the markets where South African or African products could do better are Europe, some parts of Asia, India and Latin America.
Carew is at the legacy stage of her career.  She helped to found the Newtown Film School in Johannesburg in 1992, and has won several awards. Her most memorable achievement was in 2007, when BFM won Best Director for the TV drama series, When We Were Black, at the South African Film and TV awards. Recently, BFM won the Amnesty International Award for Human Rights for a documentary called The Life and Times of Robert Sobukwe.
Despite the industry being so tough, Carew says she would encourage her son to follow in her footsteps.
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With three feature films in the pipeline, her life’s work is film, and with it, the hope that one day an Oscar for Africa will shine through the financial worries and long hours.
Many drift into making movies, including Carew, but for Kutlwano Ditsele, it was all he ever wanted to do.
“My mother says she stopped watching television with me when I was about nine years old because I was already spotting things that people wouldn’t normally see. By the time I was 11, I had more VHS tapes than I had toys; I even started building towers with my tapes, that’s how many I had,” he says.
It was also tough getting his mother to support his choice of career.
“My mom knew how difficult the industry was, so she didn’t want me to pin all my hopes on film knowing that a lot of people don’t make it; she wanted me to have security,” Ditsele says.
First he went to study public relations at Varsity College, and media at Boston Media House. But because his heart wasn’t in it, it wasn’t long before he applied to the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles to follow his dream. Ditsele then worked at a Johannesburg production company before co-founding Ripple Films in December 2010. He believes it can tell the great untold African stories.
“The first stories were told in Africa; we love telling and hearing stories. We no longer sit around fires and tell stories; the fires have now become the screens. I think we’ll be telling stories for a very long time to come in Africa; filmmakers will always have jobs. The main thing is finding a way to get the original stories out there.”
But this is proving to be difficult. For many people, African stories live in soap operas, where the viewership figures are high.
“The key is to get those people who are sitting and watching soap operas to sit in the cinema. South Africa doesn’t have a cinema-going culture and due to our small industry, our institutions don’t have the liberty to take as much risk as Hollywood.”
Ditsele says the African film industry needs to take more risks, but all too often creative freedom is choked by cautious investors.
“Our biggest problem here is we have too many people telling us what the audiences want and what we should do. They say, ‘This guy made a movie like this and it did well; you should make a movie like that guy too.’ No variety will come out of that and audiences will end up watching the same thing over and over again.”
“I still have the opportunity to live and make films in Los Angeles, but I choose to stay here because of the promise and the talent that the South African industry has. I think we have what it takes to get to the Nolly, Bolly or Hollywood level. Sticking to our guns, knowing exactly what we want to do and not giving up is what will get us there. You also need to find mentors – and don’t be arrogant; take notes.”
Ditsele believes it is also all about distribution.
“You can make the next City of God or Avatar, but if you don’t have distribution, it means nothing. Our own distributers don’t play our films enough because of quality control. But as it is, we don’t have enough films, and the two or so films that we do make are screened for a week and then taken off because X-Men is coming out,” he says.
For Ditsele the challenge is to make an African film that is better than X-Men.

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