On Wednesday, 28 January, film and television professionals protested in Cape Town, accusing the state of crippling their industry. The demonstration led to a breakthrough when the trade and industry committee chair accepted their memorandum and pledged urgent intervention. Hundreds of South African film and television workers gathered outside Parliament in Cape Town on Wednesday, 28 January, to protest against the industry’s decline.
Marching under the Save SA Film Jobs banner, the group called for immediate government intervention to address the sector’s current instability. Actors, producers, technicians, writers, crew members and other professionals across the industry value chain arrived clad in black, assembling to face a flatbed truck repurposed as a stage in front of the Parliament building on Plein Street. The protest was called in response to what the Save SA Film Jobs coalition described as “paralysis” inside the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC), which it said had crippled the Film and Television Production Incentive and triggered a collapse in production activity across the sector.
For several hours, however, the anger of the crowd was more focused on the absence of the person meant to receive their demands. Frustration grew as the crowd, waiting for hours in the heat, learnt that the chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Trade, Industry and Competition, Mzwandile Masina, was allegedly engaged in another meeting. One protester’s demand for Masina to appear in person sparked chants of “useless suits” from the crowd.
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Eventually, committee members Toby Chance and Mlondi Mdluli addressed the crowd from the truck bed without Masina. Chance and Mdluli, both in suit and tie, looked visibly out of place in the Cape Town sun, standing above a crowd of creatives. Chance laid out the scale of the financial backlog facing the industry.
“The question that I put to [Minister Parks Tau] receives the answer that you are owed R663-million by the department’s incentive scheme,” Chance told the crowd. “We know that the rebates meeting has not taken place since March 2024, and that is a serious oversight by the department.” According to Chance, Parliament’s portfolio committee only became fully aware of the depth of the problem late last year. However, the coalition noted that adjudication meetings have been stalled for two years, leaving the industry in a state of collapse despite protests in early 2025.
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