Cinemas in Africa – from cramped shacks to screenings in the Sahara
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Version 0 of 1. Kibera in Kenya bears an unhappy reputation as Africa’s biggest urban slum. Its half a million residents live in a mass of rusty brown tin-roofed huts amid dirt roads and open sewers. Sanitation is absent and electricity is scarce. It is the opposite of the shiny multiplex cinema, with its big screens, copious snacks and well-maintained toilets. Yet, Kibera has plenty to offer movie lovers. A film school opened here in 2009. And scattered throughout the slum are viewing halls stocked with DVDs where, for a small fee, patrons can watch the fruits of Bollywood, Hollywood and Nollywood, as well as football matches and, at night, pornography. The viewing halls are largely run by and for young men. One, a repurposed storage room, is featured in Ways We Watch Films in Africa, a photography exhibition mounted by the Africa in Motion film festival in Edinburgh and Glasgow from Friday. The pictures illustrate that, while Africa’s growing middle class enjoy new multiplexes and on-demand viewing at home (though slow internet connections remain a barrier), many audiences must still rely on improvisation, innovation and ingenuity to beat poverty and power cuts. From Burkina Faso to Rwanda, from South Africa to Zanzibar, cinema will find a way. Films are shown in cramped, confined backrooms or in the faded grandeur of art deco picture palaces from the colonial era. Sometimes, they are projected on to walls or screens in the open air under a star-crowded African sky. Always, there is an impulse recognisable to cinemagoers the world over. Film festivals, for example, are booming in Africa. In Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills, the festival is known as “Hillywood”. Most of those attending its outdoor screenings have never seen a film made in the local Kinyarwanda language by local producers and actors. The festival in Western Sahara, meanwhile, has a political dimension, drawing attention to the Sahrawi people’s struggle for independence from Morocco. And in Zanzibar’s festival, a recent outreach programme showed Indigenous Australian films in a village playground where cattle roam free. South Africa, the continent’s wealthiest economy, has its share of hi-tech cinema chains, and the arrival of Netflix is imminent. But urban regeneration of downtown Johannesburg, the commercial capital, has produced edgier alternatives. Audiences at the Bioscope independent cinema sit in recycled car seats or on rooftops, while hipsters of all races mingle at the free First Wednesday screenings at Atlas Studios in Melville. Perhaps the most unlikely image in the exhibition is the “cinema at the end of the world”, a Frenchman’s crazy dream to build a film theatre in the middle of the desert. He bought original seats and projection equipment from an old cinema in Cairo, took them to Sinai and arranged an electricity generator and screen. Egyptian authorities were unimpressed, however, and no film has ever been shown there. • The exhibition Ways We Watch Films in Africa is part of the Africa in Motion film festival, which opens on 23 October in Glasgow. |