The South African film and TV industry is being destroyed. Despite alleged “growth”, a heartless, ruthless industry continues to cut a cruel bloody swathe through its members, most of whom own their own businesses or are freelance technical crew.

The latest casualty is Clive Sacke, a talented Director of Photography, who committed suicide this past weekend. I pay homage to him and a stream of others claimed by illness, despair, depression, and the failure of the system: Des Burmeister, Ben Maduma, Johnny Tulukeni, Mohammed Jali, Ricardo de Carvalho, Cheryl de Carvalho, Rene Smith, Ben Phiri, Kenny Fisher, George Sithole, Ken Kirsten, Charles Jameson, Charl Phypher, Justin Fouche, Peter Makwela, Rick Lomba, Sally Caro, Jamie Uys, Les Volpe, Greg Cameron, Manie van Rensburg, Alan Barnes, Bevel Hurwitz, Xavier Arce, Junaid Ahmed, Ina Roux, Robert Russell, Philip Marsden, Ricardo Cornelius, De Wet Eysele, Collen Rampedi, Paul Witte, Gavin Horne, Giaco Angelini, Douglas Locke, Frantz Dubrowksy, Fiona Coyne, Jimmy Robb, Michael Inglesby, Hendrik Lourens, Lenny Nyozi, Neil van der Linde, Eric de Jager, Kevin Montenari, Bill Faure, and the list goes on and on and on and on.

Many of them worked all over the world. Some were in Halls of Fame or in the Global Top 10 of what they did. Most were highly talented artists and technicians. Yet many died in poverty, depressed, unhappy and struggling to survive. Many are alive by the skin of their teeth. Why?

There are no backup systems for freelancers and those who own their own companies. No medical aid. No pension fund. No savings schemes. No allowances. No perks. You slave for a minimum of 12 hours (I once worked 36 hours straight!), then have to fight for your money. If you go on holiday, you don’t get paid and you get no work, a double jeopardy. The film industry is no respecter of public holidays, Sundays or people’s dignity. You’re only as good as your last job.

You spend your own money finding work, trying to charm producers and directors, being nice to everyone while they are horrible to you, and you constantly fight a lack of professionalism, nasty attitudes, selfishness, and arrogance.

It was Hunter S Thompson who, in Generation of Swine, described the industry thus: “The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no reason. . . . Mainly we are dealing with a profoundly degenerate world, a living web of foulness, greed and treachery . . . which is also the biggest real business around and impossible to ignore. You can’t get away from TV. It is everywhere. The hog is in the tunnel.”

That was an understatement. Most of those named were not like that. They were the few good men and women, victims, often, of the foulness, greed and treachery of the South African film industry.



Agency personnel and producers often drive Porsches, expensive 4x4s, or Audi TTs. Experience counts for little. Most producers will employ the cheapest crew to make the most money for themselves. The new annual crop of film school graduates (“suicide squads”) come into the industry at half the price, with a fraction of the experience. Old school technicians, who made most of SA’s most memorable images and won strings awards languish, get ignored, or turfed out, sometimes into the gutter.

The so-called national public broadcaster, SABC, went into extreme crisis in 2008, sending a great many production companies and freelancers to the wall. Many left the industry for better, safer, more secure jobs. Nearly a decade later, the SABC is worse than ever. Private research shows that SABC’s annual failures to adhere to ICASA’s local content rules costs the independent industry at least R300m A YEAR in lost revenues, and growing.

Multichoice encouraged ultra-low budget movies, giving aspirant filmmakers R40K to make a 90-minute feature film. That’s unsustainable. Multichoice also doesn’t do documentary, a genre that created many top directors worldwide, like Werner Hertzog.

e-TV also failed the industry, doing most doccies in-house, and having complicated channel strategies that mostly close the door on local filmmakers.

The statutory body to “develop the industry”, the National Film and Video Foundation, is very poorly run and has failed to get more funds to support filmmakers. The so-called Department of Arts and Culture (run by a former police minister and known tragically as the Department of Arts Control), has failed to finalise my complaint against the NFVF in eight months! That’s not justice. They struggle to answer the phones. Of the DAC’s 2.9bn budget, just R147m went to the NFVF in the 2014/15 year – under 4%. By the 2015/16 year, it had fallen to 3% of a R3.8bn budget, of which only 25% reached those public entities supporting the promotion and development of arts and culture. That’s peanuts when it is acknowledged that the independent film and TV industry creates jobs. In 2013/14, the industry created 35,000 jobs, up from 4,000 in 1995, and contributed R3.5bn to GDP. DTI, Deloitte’s, the NFVF and DAC all admit it, but there is no money, no net, no help for those the industry spits out. No reason.

In 2015/16, the NFVF spent more than 29% of its R116.7m budget on “operating expenses” and just 34% on the development and production of content. They spent the bulk of their budget, 45% on “local/global positioning”, an euphemism, to give you a good example, for sending their Council members to spend two weeks swanning around the Cannes Film Festival taking selfies when Council members are not dealmakers, and they don’t raise foreign funds for SA production. More business gets done at MIP-TV market in Cannes over three days than in two weeks at the Cannes Film Festival, but Council is absent.

So little NFVF money goes towards the production of films that one wonders why the NFVF exists at all. They don’t have a national strategy for the industry, and they don’t look after people. Government funding lags an 84% production increase in five years, despite a proven high 2.89 jobs multiplier effect (Nov 2015 figures). The NFVF dictates what films will get made, and focuses, as they should, on younger, emerging, black filmmakers, especially women. But there is no help for filmmakers at mid-level who need a boost to go global, mainly because there are no markets at home, and no funds for their passion.

You can get maybe R200K development money from NFVF if you are lucky, and a further R200K for production, and possibly even another R200K for post production or marketing. But that will only cover about 40% of the average cost of a global documentary, so where will you find the rest of the money? The IDC will lend you money but expects to recoup, so filmmakers often just head into debt.

This is not sustainable, and will never grow our industry to meet global standards. We keep scraping the bottom, cutting costs. The first things to go are crew fees, the infamous “do-a-deal” that invariably turns sour.

The globalisation of film and TV production has meant that the pot of money is getting smaller while the pool of those trying to access that pot is growing exponentially. You might be competing with 600-1200 of the most savvy filmmakers across the world, all with compelling stories, to access an amount of money that just MIGHT get your film made, but probably will not fund it completely.

The increasing trend for funding to be tied to specific outcomes bolstering the funder’s agendas, also restricts and destroys the freedom of filmmakers to make films as they see it, and create the diversity that makes our films unique.

Despite the tough outlook, many filmmakers have ploughed on relentlessly, borrowing money from the bond on their house, selling beloved items or borrowing money. Crowdfunding has helped, but the Minister of Small Business, Lindiwe Zulu, can’t even answer e-mails or Facebook questions, and appears totally out of her depth in encouraging small businesses that create jobs. I don’t think she even knows what a film really is.

And in a globally tough economic climate, it’s harder than ever. Then the Western TV channels expect us to provide 4K or 8K films with local budgets for analogue Handycams. When you do produce something amazing, it is usually not “right” for their audience (you know, their audiences prefer European faces to African faces). Compounding this is the celebrity culture promoted by the West (and India, I have to add), the American “uniculture” ubiquitous to our so-called local “distributors”, and the complete and utter failure of the SA industry to create and develop audiences and distribute local content.

If my partner didn’t have a full-time job and a medical aid that paid for my own fight against cancer, I would probably be on the list above. This story would not have been told.

A country is least remembered for its bean-counters or public servants. It is, without exception, remembered for the inspiration, imagination and creation of those wonderful passionate people who MAKE art and culture. Do without it, and we all go down the drain, quickly, burning, and in great pain. Respect to those who died to make this story.