This website supports a PhD thesis in which I, Simon Bright, investigate the role played by Zimmedia productions and the film festivals we initiated in the development of transnational Southern African Film during the 1980s and 1990s.
Transnational organisation within the Frontline states played a very significant role in the resistance to apartheid. Cultural workers including filmmakers, were at the heart of that struggle. With the growth of populist nationalism in Southern Africa, memories of transnational collaboration through film during and after the fight against apartheid have disappeared from the historical record. My DPhil submission consists of eight Zimmedia films made between 1986 and 2012 as well as selections of the Zimmedia archive which uniquely memorialises key manifestoes of the First Zimbabwean African Film festival as well as the correspondence, minutes and the dailies of the Southern African Film Festival and the First African Input conference.The archive reveals the engagement and support of FEPACI (The Pan African Federation of Filmmakers) in the development of this cinema movement and I will also reflect on how nationalism and identity politics affected these developments and helped define academic histories of cinema in Southern Africa.
During the 1960s as I was growing up in Rhodesia, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front party won the 1962 election. Three years later he unilaterally declared Rhodesia’s independence from the British Crown and his government took progressively more extreme measures to entrench white privilege.This conflicted strongly with my family’s active anti-racist and cosmopolitan political culture and in 1968 we left Rhodesia in protest at the encroachment of a racist police state. I understood very clearly that the authoritarian whites-only Rhodesian education system and culture that had surrounded me, was, like South African apartheid, focused not only on reinforcing a system of oppressive discrimination, but also on re-enforcing an essentialist white identity. This left me with a profound antagonism to racism and a dislike of nationalism which informed all my subsequent work. My film-making and the work of Zimmedia Productions were inspired and underpinned by this broader social and political incentive. My film-making and the work of Zimmedia Productions were inspired and underpinned by this broader social and political incentive.
