| DISTRIBUTION
established new lives and identities in Kenya. It premiered at Nairobi’s Storymoja Festival at the National Museum and was well received at various festivals around the world, picking up distributors in Europe and the US. “I decided to see what I could do about getting it distributed in Kenya. That’s when I came up against a brick wall,” Mann says. Mann first tried to get the film distributed with the help of Eddie Irura, managing editor of industry website FilmKenya. DVD copies were made, with 10 given to the shop at the National Museum. For the copies that remained, Mann found her options severely limited. She experimented with the idea of selling a few copies through a local supermarket – these promptly disappeared without a trace. She was able to sell some copies at screenings at a low price of US$5 each, which didn’t even cover the costs of making the DVDs, but was still too high for most Kenyans; at screenings in the US, she could sell them at $35 a copy. She then attempted online distribution, signing up with now defunct South African-based VOD platform Wabona, again to no avail.
The informal sector Mann’s experiences may have been coloured to a certain extent by the genre
in which she works; documentary is seldom a big seller. However, even popular entertainment content struggles to find an outlet. Although regional broadcasters do option a fair amount of the product that comes out of the burgeoning low-budget, Swahililanguage industries in Kenya and Tanzania – both of which are heavily influenced by Nigeria’s Nollywood system – much of this content is distributed direct to the public by the producers or sold on the street. The absence of formal distribution outlets has led to the growth of a major informal market, from which it is very difficult for producers to recoup any revenue. “There are no distribution systems in place in Kenya other than the River Road ‘underground’ system,” Mann says. “Although this is fast evolving into a more professional system that provides local TV with a great deal of content, it only works for filmmakers who can produce content very cheaply and quickly, and who don’t care about the street-life of their work. Three months is about the maximum life of a film on the street – after that, you have to produce another one. There are stories of 600 copies of a film being sold in a day, and certainly there are armies of vendors in the streets and markets of downtown Nairobi. But this unofficial system does not contribute to the national economy, nor is it
controlled or licensed in any way. Anyone can make and sell copies of anything.” Even South Africa, with its more developed distribution and licensing systems, suffers the backlash of a growing underground market, with cheap, pirated copies of films available at almost every traffic light or flea market in Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town. The country’s handful of major distributors puts little emphasis on local content, since it is far easier to reach an audience with tried and tested international product. And, as the NFVF research shows, the public don’t see the need to pay the proper price for the content they consume. Many of those included in the NFVF survey even went so far as to say that local content should be free – or at least much cheaper than international content.
Continued expansion And yet the industry continues to grow. More and more people seek to express themselves through the motion picture medium and training institutions face increasing intake. They train technical operatives, often to a very high standard (South African crews are regarded as among the best in the world) and this is fine, provided there is sufficient, sustainable demand for their services once they graduate and they can ask for
livable rates. Schools also train producers, writers and directors, assuring them that they can be the storytellers they have always dreamed of being. Again, this is fine, provided that they are also trained to provide the entrepreneurial impetus needed to drive the industry – and taught to understand that success in their chosen fields will be the exception rather than the norm. So far, there are no training institutions addressing the lack of distribution and sales outlets, no courses are offered on how to market and distribute films, no specialists are trained to enter this sector. Audience development initiatives put forward by governmental and nongovernmental organisations amount to little more than unactionable rhetoric. The result is a market that is really no market at all: the formal sector a virtual monopsony with one or two large broadcasters and cinematic distributors able to set the prices they desire; and the informal sector an uncontrolled hodgepodge of indifferent consumers who are spoiled for choice. Faced with diminishing budgets and margins in both sectors, content makers seem to have fewer and fewer options to help them build their audiences and sustain their passion and livelihoods. – Warren Holden September 2015 | SCREENAFRICA | 35