An industry that once employed almost 32,000 people and generated more than R7-billion per annum has been halted by inaction within the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition. Something has to be done, or South African filmmaking will be killed off – perhaps forever. Part one of, yes, a series.
It’s like a gripping Western, full of dead bodies and bloodshed, except there’s no mystery as to who the villain is: the South African film and television industry has been murdered by the South African government. In 2026, creative sectors everywhere are having the life squeezed out of them. Corporatisation, consolidation and the rise of ideologically driven authoritarianism have left high-cost, high-risk creative industries like film and television scrambling for scraps in an increasingly small bowl.
The Netflix effect has turned a standards-driven artform into an algorithmically driven distraction machine. Regardless, humans make films. Humans watch films.
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For South Africa, a country with infinite locations, hardworking crew, great conditions and an unemployment rate of 58% for young people — the perfect labour pool for this sector — how has the grisly demise of its film and television industry been possible? Or, better put, how has this beenallowedto be possible? Well, at an institutional and policy-making level in this country, culture is worthless.
Filmmaking, and culture-making more broadly, are not treated as major drivers of employment, nor as generators of economic activity. South Africa’s culture minister is a faux-gangster troglodyte who thinks books are something you cook, while President Cyril Ramaphosa only has eyes for prize cattle. And yet there are demonstrable successes in proving that culturematters, and cultureisan industry.
The oft-cited example of the South Korean entertainment industry understood 30 years ago that investing in culture meant investing in global soft power.Hallyu,or “Korean Wave”, contributed 37-trillion Won (R433-billion) to the economy between 2017 and 2021 alone,according to the Korea Economic Research Institute, and placed the country in the top 10 most culturally influential in the world. You only need to spend five minutes with an eight-year old – or their parents – anywhere on earth to understand that K-pop has penetrated the world’s consciousness in a way that is undeniable, and deeply, deeply effective. The box office smash hit Parasite jettisoned the country and its star director, Bon Joong Ho, to the Oscars and beyond in 2019, enshrining the country’s film industry as one of the world’s most productive and important.
It also earned roughly $260-million off an $11-million budget, despite being fully subtitled. What’s more, a country that rarely sees itself onscreen and that is unable to make its own myths and build its own legends is little more than a shell, waiting for a hostile takeover. Daily Maverick has spoken to numerous film and television industry professionals over the course of reporting this story, and they all say the same thing: the industry is on life support.
And there’s no one manning the ICU. The average film or series employs upwards oftwo hundred people, some highly skilled, many more in the process of becoming skilled, thanks to the almost entirely practical nature of filmmaking. Almost all positions on a film set begin at a low bar of entry.
(No one needs a PhD to score music or design costumes for a movie.) The Netflix series One Piece, one of the few productions currently filming in Cape Town, has a crew of over a thousand people, while each episode costs around $10-million. Indeed, budgets can rise far higher – the final episodes of Stranger Things cost about $50-million each. The amount of money is staggering – each production is like a medium-sized mine or manufacturing plant, except it leaves no trace and causes minimal environmental damage.
It’s all upside, no downside, zero skin off anyone’s back. What’s more, its outputs last forever, without clogging up rivers or peppering your testicles with microplastics.
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