When the battle against the Portuguese ended, Samora Machel was aware of the importance of image. The first Mozambican president saw strategic power in film and how it helped him promote national unity. His government established the National Institution of Audiovisual and Cinema (INAC), one of its first cultural initiatives, in 1976. It produced more than 300 documentaries the following decade, in an initiative dubbed Kuxa Kanema, which showed how the newborn nation took its first steps. With Machel’s death in 1986, and Mozambique’s turn towards the West, the small industry almost became extinct.
“It is true that there was a decline, especially when the country opened up to the market economy with the arrival of the IMF,” says Djalma Lourenço, director of INAC.
Producers began to emerge in Maputo due to private initiatives. The production of documentaries and advertisements for the innumerable NGOs that work in the country are their bread and butter. While short films are emerging, nobody dares speak of a Mozambican film industry.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-31175" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/cine_africa_20121016_9-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/cine_africa_20121016_9-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/cine_africa_20121016_9-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/cine_africa_20121016_9-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/cine_africa_20121016_9.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“An industry presupposes a value chain, that we yet to have in Mozambique,” says João Ribeiro, director of The Last Flight of the Flamingo, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010.
Cinematic legislation forces international producers to establish partnerships with local producers, who are often unable to survive on their artistic ambitions.
“The fundamental structure of a Mozambican producer is to produce institutional documentaries and advertisements in order to fundraise to be able to produce their own work,” says Renato Chagas, a Portuguese director, who moved to Mozambique six years ago during the country’s boom years due to American and European investments.
In April 2006, Maputo was brought to a standstill with the filming of Blood Diamond, directed by Edward Zwick. The film, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, had an estimated budget of $100 million, according to IMDb.
“In four months, eight million dollars was spent in Mozambique in hard cash. Just downtown, in the capital, a million was spent on renting out stores and closing down streets,” says Ribeiro, who worked as executive director on the film.
Yet, the millions Hollywood brought to Mozambique had a perverse effect. The costs of production elevated exponentially once local authorities, such as the Maputo municipality, grossly increased the prices of road rental. Mozambican producers are also all too familiar with excessive bureaucracy as a result.
“Filming in Mozambique is a headache. Before we begin filming, we have to fulfill a series of requirements with the different organizations, like INAC or the Ministry of Interior,” says producer Mickey Fonseca.
“Mozambique is not film friendly,” added his colleague Pipas Forjaz.
The two men, who have won numerous international awards for their documentaries, established a production company, Mahla Filmes, in 2009. Both were recently involved in the production of Caught in a Flight, by Oliver Hirschbiegel. Due to Mozambique’s appeal to cinematographers, the biographical film, which cost $32 million, lends its landscapes to Angola to tell the story of Princess Diana’s final years.
“We have a unique reality: architecture from the ’50s and ’60s that, still today, is hard to find in other cities. Furthermore, we have virgin landscapes and social stability,” says Ribeiro.
The Mozambican Law of Cinema, which will be voted on this year, continues to lack consensus. According to INAC, Mozambique produces around 25 works, either documentaries or films, annually. Finding a way to bring long-term sustainability to these productions is the key to creating a Mozambican film industry. But, how to achieve it?
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-31174" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/joao_ribeiro-44-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/joao_ribeiro-44-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/joao_ribeiro-44-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/joao_ribeiro-44-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/joao_ribeiro-44.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Mônica Monteiro of Cinevideo, a Brazilian production company with an annual profit of nearly $23 million, says that Mozambique is a commercial bridge for the rest of Africa because it caters for the Lusophone market, which has close to 250 million speakers. Cinevideo’s aims are to produce films that allow consumers to identify with Mozambican productions. She believes that financing should be sought in Europe.
“The Old World consumes lots of Africa, as a result of their historic relationship.”
A taste of the money available from Europe is the program ACP Cultures+, which is destined to cultural sectors in countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, to the value of €30 million ($40 million). Funds are available until 2013, but with the current financial crisis in the Old World, it is at the brink of extinction, unless someone puts in some legwork, and quick, the diamond could lose its luster.   FL

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Lights,  Camera,  Mozambique

Luis Nhaca is as much a diplomat as a doorman. His is the first face you see as you arrive at the collonaded entrance to the Polana Hotel in Mozambique. For three decades, he has marshaled the guests, and their luggage, through the portals of one of Africa’s most famous hotels. Many of those who passed through gave a badge as a memento. Nhaca has 396 of them on his coat to show for years of diplomatic service on the door. His favorite is from his beloved football club in Portugal, Benfica—handed to him by club chairman Luís Felipe Vieira. Benfica has always kept close links with a country that produced many of its legends including: Mário Coluna; Eusébio and Vicente. All three Africans, from Mozambique, played in the 1966 World Cup in one of the greatest ever Portuguese teams.
Their careers were over, but not forgotten by Nhaca, when he started work at the Polana in 1979, aged 12, in the laundry room. Nhaca learned the ropes from his father, Simeão, who had worked at the hotel for decades, on his way to becoming the face of the Polana.
Down the years, Nhaca has greeted them all: Jimmy Carter; Bill Clinton; Thabo Mbeki; Kenneth Kaunda and Robert Mugabe. His favorite guest was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president of Brazil.
“Not only was he always very friendly to me, when he used to dispatch his ministers to Mozambique, he used to instruct them to greet me on his behalf,” says Nhaca speaking in Portuguese through a translator, on the busy steps of the Polana.
By far, the visitor Nhaca misses most is the late Samora Machel, the charismatic first president of independent Mozambique; a man-of-the-people, if ever there was one.
“When he died, it left us with a scar,” says Nhaca.
Legend has it, Machel used to stroll between the marble pillars and under the sparkling chandeliers, in his green cap and army fatigues, greeting everyone from the cleaners to the concierge. Nhaca says Machel always insisted the hotel workers ate when he did at state banquets.
“Machel used to love Mozambican music. He used to sponsor a choir at the Polana and when he came here for dinner, he would ask them to sing for him by the pool. He would get very emotional and would get up and start dancing—his security men would surround him to shield him for fear he would hurt himself or fall in the pool!” says Nhaca with a smile.
The Polana may have been full of good cheer in the Machel years, but the business wasn’t. Independence, in 1975, saw the hotel run by the staff and used as a hostel for foreign workers. Supplies and spare parts were scarce and often staff would strip hardware from one floor to patch up a room on another.
The manager of the Polana, Miguel Afonso dos Santos, who left a five-star hotel in Lisbon to take up the job in Maputo, says in the lean days there were squares of newspaper, instead of toilet paper, in the bathrooms.
“The hotel had its ups and downs, but never stopped operating. When I said I was taking the job almost everyone I spoke to in Lisbon had a good memory to share with me. They would tell me that their grandparents were married in the hotel or their parents spent their honeymoon here,” says dos Santos.
The reality of running 142 rooms on a 10-acre site, so vast that it needs to employ 18 security guards as well as 400 workers, is not so romantic. When the Polana needs food or fittings, it has to import from South Africa, by road; shampoo or linen comes from Portugal by ship, taking up to five months.
“It is a problem because these days people want things now. We always have to keep one step ahead&#8230; I want to buy everything from Mozambique because it would take less time and make more sense. It is much better than it used to be, you can get a lot of things now from the local market, but I don’t know when the day will be when we can buy everything here. I have no idea,” says dos Santos.
Overall, dos Santos appears proud of a hotel that, despite being far from cheap, appears to have given the recession the slip. He says, this year, it is running at a capacity of 75% with plans to build 14 villas, in the expanse at the back that overlooks the sea, for long-stay guests. More than one in five of the guests are businesspeople from Portugal and South Africa. The hotel attracts its fair share of rich pop stars and playboys, but most come for business in a country riding a resource boom. On any given day, you can see the big deals being done in the restaurant overlooking the Indian Ocean.
A $25 million facelift, completed in 2011, shows the proprietors, an arm of the Nairobi-based, Serena Hotels, owned by the Aga Khan, are looking to the future for a building steeped in the past. It modernized the classic architectural lines drawn up by the Polana’s creator, Herbert Baker, nearly a century ago. The English architect also designed the Union Buildings and Pretoria Station, in South Africa.
“This is a demanding job, this is not just another hotel. I am responsible for a big brand. We host people like Ban Ki-moon—it is our responsibly to keep the mirror of the nation shining. When people come here from nations around the world they want to talk to me about what is happening in this country. I am almost a diplomat,” says dos Santos.
The man on the door agrees.

Millionaires’ Playground In A Palace By The Sea

He grew up in a world where doing business was a foreign concept and capitalism a dirty word. This was the world of Mozambique in the 70s and 80s where Moreira Chonguica’s worldview was formed by the regime of socialist-communist leader Samora Machel, who favored state-owned corporations over the private sector.
“The word business did not apply to me because of the context I grew up in. I never thought about business,” says Chonguica, 35, when thinking back to his youth.
So when he started playing the saxophone as a teenager, it was meant to be a hobby, not a career. It took him many years until he realized that he could make a decent living from his passion. Today, he is actively marketing himself as a brand, by associating with big corporations like Woolworths and Vodacom.
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Chonguica always felt at home in the world of jazz. Every afternoon after school, almost religiously, he visited the local library to browse through leading jazz magazines like Downbeat and Jazz Times, learning about the international world of music. He came to know about festivals, master classes, the music business and the evolution of sound technology.
“I thought, ‘Hello, there is something here that I am missing.’ I started questioning myself and I understood, ‘Ah, music is a business!’” he recalls.
Reading musicians’ biographies became his obsession. Chonguica wanted to find out all he possibly could about the person behind the voice, the business behind the musician.
“From watching music videos on TV, I always thought being a musician was just fun. But when I started reading about the successful artists of that time, like Bryan Adams, Sting, Michael Jackson, MC Hammer, Run-D.M.C., Vanilla Ice. It dawned on me that they are musicians, but they are also companies,” he says.
That’s what he wanted to achieve, as well, one day, he thought.
Chonguica did not only look behind the scenes of music. He also studied the careers of famous sportsmen like basketball star Michael Jordan and the business success stories of multinational corporations like fast food chain McDonalds.
“Michael Jordan created a fingerprint, an identity, a lifestyle. I understood that it’s not only about your success as a sportsman. It’s the way you talk, the way you dress, what you drink, with whom you collaborate. My perspective had changed completely. I started looking at music the same way as at sport,” he explains.
One day the penny dropped: he had to turn himself into a trademark.
But until then, Chonguica had a long road ahead. How was he going to grow his fledgling music career into a thriving business? Step one, was to leave poverty-stricken Mozambique, which had just emerged from more than two decades of bloody internal conflict. He enrolled as a music student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa in 1997. Living for the first time in a market-driven economy, Chonguica woke up to a sobering reality: combining his dream of being a jazz artist with making money would be extremely difficult.
“I suddenly realized that it would have made much more sense to study economics or engineering or architecture. I got a fright. I thought I have no future. I didn’t want to be just another poor musician.”
In a panic, he played with the thought of de-registering from his studies. It was a drastic decision for someone whose relationship with music had begun early on in his life, pretty much before he could walk or talk. His father, a medical doctor who ran the national health ministry’s pharmacy department, was an ardent music lover. The turntable in the family’s living room in Maputo’s Polana neighborhood hardly stood still.
“My father had a huge collection of LPs. Miles Davis, Fela Kuti, Johnny Clegg, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, James Brown, Pink Floyd, the Police and lots of instrumental jazz. Every evening when he came home from work, he put the system on loud,” says Chonguica.
Chonguica, the boy, listened, and his devotion to music grew. He soon attended a state-subsidized music school where he was introduced to the saxophone—an instrument he never put down again. It was this deep-seated relationship with music that made him years later, as a student, change his mind once again.
“I realized that a musician is who I am. I decided that I have to make it work. I have to change the game. I cannot just play saxophone, I have to turn it into a business.”
And so he graduated with a degree in jazz performance and ethnomusicology and started to play and tour with top South African jazz artists, such as Jimmy Dludlu and Alvin Dyers.
“I purposefully attached myself to the big names, toured with them and played at the top jazz festivals in the world,” says Chonguica.
“It’s like when you’re a soccer player, you want to play with Real Madrid,” he says in reference to the Spanish football club, one of the top performing clubs in the world.
A trip to the United States in 2000 opened his eyes to the world of music even further.
“I saw musicians making a lot of money, getting the right publicity, becoming famous. It was ‘wow’. My perspective of how the music business works totally changed,” he says.
His role model became Quincy Jones, who over five decades in the entertainment industry not only excelled as a jazz trumpeter and performer but became one of the top record producers of all time, working with pop icons like Michael Jackson.
“Quincy Jones is my hero because he shaped and changed the world with music. He built an empire,” says Chonguica.
Back in South Africa, Chonguica changed tack. He didn’t want to be a member of someone else’s band anymore. He wanted to become an artist in his own right, build his own brand. He teamed up with Woolworths and was a celebrity model for the retailer’s winter men’s collection. He became a brand ambassador for Laurentina Premium, an SABMiller beer, Vodacom Mozambique and Mozambican airline LAM, and has collaborated with Nokia, J&amp;B and Mozambique’s largest commercial bank BCI.
“I am marketing myself differently [from other jazz artists]. I am creating concepts of myself, buzz words. Someone will say ‘I know that guy. I want to book him’,” he explains.
He also created an independent recording label, Morestar Entertainment, and produced several albums of conceptual African fusion of jazz, cleverly keeping tabs on his musical output as well as his earnings: “I own everything I do.” Three South Africa Music Awards (SAMA) and another two nominations later, Chonguica’s records can be downloaded from all major music websites, like iTunes, SoundCloud or ReverbNation, giving Chonguica a global presence.
But it’s the branding that has kept Chonguica financially afloat much more than income generated from performances or music sales, especially since the global financial crisis hit in 2008.
“The first thing that’s affected in an economic downturn is entertainment. There are less jazz festivals, reduced budgets for musicians. I came to the conclusion that I can’t depend on festivals and gigs to make money. It’s not sustainable,” he says.
Chonguica’s advice to young musicians: Create our own concepts. Brand your band, young man.

Tag: Samora Machel

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Lights, Camera, Mozambique

Millionaires’ Playground In A Palace By The Sea

Brand Your Band, Young Man