By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 21 August 2018)
The indefatigable
Zippy Okoth sent out a call last March for films made exclusively in African
languages to vie for awards at her Third Lake International Panafrican Film
Festival (LIPFF).
By 30th
May when the deadline for submissions had come, Dr Okoth and her team at the
Legacy Arts & Film Lab, (organisers of the Festival) had received no less
than 1,983 films with 398 coming from African filmmakers.
“It’s a
great improvement from last year when we received 1,508 films in total,” says
Kenya’s first female Ph.D in Theatre Arts from a Kenyan (Kenyatta) university.
Fresh from
producing, directing, scriptwriting and acting in the solo role of “Silent
Voices” at Kenya National Theatre earlier this month, Zippy’s story was
undeniably autobiographical. For while she never quite confessed her character
(the one whose life is documented in her “Diary of a Divorced Woman”) was
herself, when she said, (after receiving her doctorate in the play), that she
was now on her way to ‘building [her] empire’, we knew this was the real Zippy.
And for
sure, the Legacy Theatre & Film Lab which she registered in 2015 is a major
step in that direction. But even more so is LIPFF, which will take place in
Nakuru 7th-10th November at several venues.
Out of the 1,983
films submitted, the 145 finalists were announced on her website www.theatrefilmlabkenya.com this
week. They will be screened at the Nakuru Players Theatre, at the city’s Kenya National
Library Services and in two social halls, one at Bondeni, one at Kaptembwo.
“Films from
fourteen African countries will be screened during the festival,” says Zippy
who noted there are 46 coming from Kenya and 66 from Nigeria. The rest will be
from Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, South Africa,
Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and one that’s a collaboration between
Congo (DRC) and Kenya.
Four categories
of films were submitted for selection, namely feature and short films,
animations and documentary films.
Vetting all
1,983 films was an arduous process, but Zippy has a veritable army of
assistants who support her “imperial” ambitions, knowing she is lifting up a
whole lot of people in the process of her artistic rise in Kenya’s vibrant
cultural world.
The best
evidence of her building up others as she moves ahead is the film ‘Seredo’
which grew out of the scriptwriting workshop she held last year during the
Festival. “Seredo was made by three Kisumu youth groups who wrote the script
during the workshop,” Zippy says.
This year,
the three-day workshop to be held during the festival will be on acting. One can apply to be in it from 1st September.
Criteria for
judging which films would reach the festival finals had everything to do with
quality of filmmaking. But even before a film’s quality was considered, the big
issue in LIPFF is language.
“All the
films had to be made in African languages,” says Dr. Okoth, who adds that
English is not included among the languages that qualified.
“All the
films must have English sub-titles,” she concedes. But otherwise, the languages
that one will hear during the festival range from Kiswahili and Hausa to Xhosa,
Afro-Franco and Maa.
Zippy’s
grateful to have support this year from the French Embassy, Kenya Film
Commission, Kenya Film Classification Board and Nakuru County. But she is still
fundraising to ensure African filmmakers see the value of continuing in their
artistic enterprise of telling Africans’ stories from their own perspective.
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