Love, Feminism and Freedom on the Indian Ocean: Lula Ali Ismail and Amil Shivji on East Africa’s Film Renaissance

Love, Feminism and Freedom on the Indian Ocean: Lula Ali Ismail and Amil Shivji on East Africa’s Film Renaissance

by Bhakti Shringarpure

“The ocean is part of me,” says Djiboutian filmmaker Lula Ali Ismail, “so if it’s not in my films, I feel like something is missing.” In Ismail’s debut feature film, Dhalinyaro (Youth), three young women navigate friendship and family as they confront uncertain futures when high school graduation looms on the horizon. For the three friends—Heba, Asma and Deka—the beach might simply be a place to gather for gossip, flirt with boys or a spot for a clandestine rendezvous, but it is also an equalizer given the class disparities between the girls. Meanwhile, Ismail’s panoramic shots of the port of Djibouti are a reminder of the country’s cultural and geopolitical complexity since it straddles the Horn of Africa, Asia, and Europe. When the young girls leap into the water to celebrate exam results in the film’s triumphant finale, Ismail seems to be conveying that for the protagonists and for Djibouti, the world can be their oyster; the smallness of place is not a barrier when water is their freedom song.

In another film from another small place, the waters of the Indian ocean become integral to an ongoing decolonial uprising as communist pamphlets and even a printing press gets smuggled through dhows in and out of Zanzibar. Amil Shivji’s period drama Vuta N’Kuvute (Tug of War) tells the story of star-crossed lovers, Denge and Yasmin, who hail from different racial, ethnic, and political backgrounds. Both are on a quest for freedom. Trained in the Soviet Union, Denge is a Black revolutionary who is working to rid Zanzibaris of the double yoke of British colonialism and the monarchy. Yasmin is a young Indian-Muslim woman who has fled an oppressive arranged marriage to an older man and escapes to the home of Black dancehall singer Mawajuma who lives literally and proverbially on the other side of town. Racial lines blur as love between Denge and Yasmin blossoms, and the youthful group of friends become inadvertent revolutionaries laboring and plotting together to get Denge out of prison.

In both films, dreams of freedom, sisterhood, feminism, love, and solidarity play out across the ever-fluctuating yet ever-embracing waters of the Indian ocean.

Imagery in these films is lush, evocative, and laden with symbolism in part due to the rich cinematography and the use of elliptical storytelling. Dhalinyaro and Vuta N’Kuvute reveal a dedication to carving out a new aesthetic vocabulary while retaining an uncompromising political vision that is committed to an honest and complex representation of the places, people, histories and struggles in their home countries. In these instances, directors have chosen the harder path to make these films by insisting on hiring and training local talent and developing stories that will appeal to and provoke debate within the regional setting. In addition to financial challenges of this type of activism-inflected art-making, an even greater obstacle is that of finding, curating, and cultivating film viewership. To this day, the number of movie theaters and screen capacity, more broadly, remains shockingly low across the African continent. The problem has not been resolved with the proliferation of streaming platforms whose tendency to use market logic means that artistic, non-commercial cinema is not a priority. Ismail and Shivji are adamant about not making films only for a European festival circuit but want to ensure that their films are watched locally.

Fortunately, neither Ismail nor Shivji are alone in their pursuits or in their mindsets. They belong to a set of up-and-coming filmmakers from East African countries that have been instrumental in ushering in a new wave of cinema in the last decade. Historically, the epicenter of African cinema has been in West Africa with filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène, Safi Faye, Med Hondo, Djibril Diop Mambety, and others credited with groundbreaking filmmaking and the popular films of Nollywood in Nigeria leading the charge in terms of sheer volume. North African cinema also has a distinct identity in part due to Egypt and Tunisia’s impressive output and lone ranger South Africa has its own prolific film industry comprising a mix of popular and artistic cinema. Despite some big names like Ethiopian Haile Gerima and sporadic successes, East Africa has remained largely under the radar of international attention and recognition. Recently, Wanuri Kahiu’s controversial lesbian romance Rafiki (2019) appeared to suddenly put the region in the spotlight but in fact, cinema in the region has been steadily growing in the past years. Filmmakers from Sudan and South Sudan, in particular, have been making their mark with Amjad Abu Alala’s You Will Die at Twenty (2019) premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and garnering critical acclaim as well. South Sudanese filmmaker Akuol de Mabior has also transitioned from making shorts to releasing her first full-length documentary, No Simple Way Home (2022) at a film festival in Berlin. In Djibouti, Ismail has single-handedly kickstarted a film industry and Somali-Finnish director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed’s film The Gravedigger’s Wife (2021) was entirely shot there and employed a local ensemble cast with the help of Ismail.

Filmmakers as well filmgoers in East Africa might be ushering in a cultural renaissance but there is still a long way to go and plenty of obstacles to overcome. I spoke with Ismail and Shivji over Zoom and the conversation with these two young and dynamic filmmakers spanned a large range moving seamlessly between the personal, intellectual, and political. Both come from different backgrounds and geographies, and this becomes apparent in their aesthetic and thematic approaches as well as their unique storytelling imperatives. But it is evident that they emerge from a similar ethos and are keen to tell stories that are “honest to their own cultures,” as Shivji says. More importantly, he explains that their “generation is very committed to bringing the films back home,” and indeed these two filmmakers have done just that. They have rejected an artistic trajectory imposed by the history of colonial relationships between Europe and Africa, and insist instead on a bold, fresh, and activist filmmaking that can educate and empower their communities.  

They have rejected an artistic trajectory imposed by the history of colonial relationships between Europe and Africa, and insist instead on a bold, fresh, and activist filmmaking that can educate and empower their communities.  

Bhakti Shringarpure: Why were you drawn to film and how did you both become filmmakers?

Lula Ali Ismail: It was a coincidence. I enrolled in an acting class when I was in Montreal because I was very timid and shy, and I resolved to change this by frightening myself. So I went to an acting class where I had to go and talk in front of people. From there on, I really loved the acting class and stayed for almost three years. I loved it so much that I tried to do the acting thing and to audition for different parts in Montreal, but it didn’t really work out. I had two choices; to leave it and keep working at this law firm. Or I write a short film for myself in which I would interpret the main part. I had no idea how much work that would be, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to talk about. I wanted a subject that would make everyone talk. So I came back to Djibouti and decided to write and act in the short film Laan (Friends) about young women who are seeking love but are also confronting society’s addiction to khat leaves. I became a filmmaker par hasard, as we say.

BS: It seems to me that you were comfortable acting, and you were comfortable writing but what about directing? It seems to require different skills and a more dominating personality.

LAI: Actually, I was only thinking of myself. I needed to find a job and a part that I really liked, and who would give me that part but me? I had to write a part that suited me and which is not only a maid or a prostitute. And so, when I wrote it, I chose the main part in the short film and the next step was that I had to direct what I wrote. I was only driven by the desire to create work for myself.

I had to write a part that suited me and which is not only a maid or a prostitute.

Amil Shivji: My story is similar and different in many ways, and it was also completely by coincidence that I ended up in film. I knew I wanted to write, and I guess the most realistic version of that would have been journalism. I was hell-bent on going to the University of Cape Town for a double major in journalism and mass communications. Then I had some time on my hands between high school graduation and the beginning of the university year in South Africa. My family was trying to convince me to just get a job or do one semester somewhere to make use of my time. So I was applying to all these universities that my older sister was applying to for her masters. It was an exercise for my writing skills, and long story short, I ended up getting a full scholarship to York University in Toronto in the film program. At that time, it was one of the top ten film programs in North America. First, I didn’t take it because why would I take film? It was simply a mistake. I had ticked off that box because I knew I wasn’t going. But then it was a really prestigious scholarship, it would look good on my CV, and my entire high school convinced me to go for one semester and go to Cape Town after. So I went to Canada.

It was a film studies program and I started learning about Sergei Eisenstein and watching films like Battleship Potemkin, stuff that really resonated with my politics during that time. More importantly, as we were ending the semester, and I was preparing to pack my bags, we did a class on African cinema. This was the first time at the age of eighteen that I was watching African films made in the sixties by people like Sembene and Mambety. I started learning about Third cinema; the movement of progressive leftwing African cinema. This was what I wanted to do in writing, this was exactly what I wanted to do with my journalism, but it was now through a medium that was able to cross so many more borders and have a language of its own. I think it also came from a place of extreme anger, because I’m sitting in this classroom with 500 mostly white students from North America who are studying this textbook where there are a thousand pages on the so-called history of narrative cinema and just one page on Africa. So it’s all your clichés of the stereotypical approach to African pedagogy and cinema. I also learned of an African Cinema course that had been dropped because of budget cuts—but they were nice enough to give me the syllabus. I started going through it, and I ended up spending the next three years in Toronto taking every course and writing papers on comparative analysis studies of African films, so I could get the university to bring in the films, bring in the texts and the literature.

I ended up making my own course of study for these four years, and then moved back to Tanzania immediately, and started making films. I made a short called Shoeshine which was a no-strings attached project, and I had a small amount of funding from Canal Plus. It did very well in the festival circuit but also in the country. It was a twenty-four-minute film that people loved, and it made me realize that there was a deep desire for this kind of storytelling—telling stories from the margins of society but also being honest to our cultures. And I’ve been doing that for ten years now.

I’m a child of Djibouti so I can look within too. I really wanted to talk about stories that matter here

BS: There is a Canada theme with both of you. Lula was living in Montreal and Amil studied in Toronto but there’s also obviously some pull of nationalism too. Lula, you wanted to make a film, so you went to Djibouti. Amil learned that African film history is ignored and consumed all these African films in the West, and then went back to Tanzania to make the actual films. There’s a kind of a move back, an imperative to return…

LAI: Yeah, I was fairly young when I moved to Montreal, and it actually never crossed my mind to shoot a film in Montreal. It’s weird to say that but when I look back now, my first instinct when I decided to write a story or to try making a film was that I instantly thought about Djibouti. And I just came back to Djibouti. It wasn’t premeditated, it was a spontaneous movement. I wanted to talk about something that would not leave anyone indifferent within Djibouti. I’m Djiboutian, but I’ve been away long enough that I can look at it from a distance and at the same time I’m a child of Djibouti so I can look within too. I really wanted to talk about stories that matter here.

BS: Lula, what were some of the films that inspired you and made you hungry to make films. Amil talked about the films that excited him like the African cinema syllabus, the Russians, and so on. What about you?

LAI: I am inspired by a lot of different films by filmmakers like Ousmane Sembene, Alain Gomis, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Kenji Mizogushi. But what drives me to make film is to be able to talk from within. That’s really important to me.

BS: Let’s talk a little bit about both your segues into making incredible debut feature films. How did they come about, and what were the main challenges?

AS: It’s a long answer but I read the novel Vuta n’Kuvute by Adam Shafi in high school as it was mandatory reading in Kiswahili literature. Then when I was writing T-Junction in 2016, I was getting sort of stuck and returned to reading the masters of Swahili literature. I picked up Vuta n’Kuvute again and didn’t put it down until I finished it. I fell in love with it all over again and this time as a filmmaker, I saw how cinematic it was, its use of language and how beautifully it had been written. I knew immediately it had to be a film, but the idea seemed far-fetched because there had never been an adaptation in the region and none that I knew of this scale—a period drama based in the fifties. The first thing I did was approach the author and we chatted about it for three hours, discussing the characters and my problems with the novel. And he basically said, look I’ve done my work and written the novel, and now you need to do yours, and you should have all the freedom that you want. And looking back I think that if he hadn’t said that, I probably would have never made the film, because I needed that courage to take on this venture.

Perhaps similar to Djibouti, there’s no infrastructure for cinema in Tanzania, so now I was trying to make a period drama and was quite adamant about hiring locals. So I started taking tour operators in Zanzibar and training them to be transport captains or production managers on film and teaching them film language. I took lawyers and accountants who worked in hotels and taught them about film budgets. I spent a year and a half doing workshops and casting locally as much as possible, and then we shot in November of 2019. We started post-production in 2020 and then this little virus comes along, and we had to stop. We just ended up working online and did two edits with two different editors over the months and the film finally premiered in Toronto in 2021.

BS: It’s really an incredible journey, and I wonder if your story is similar, Lula. I wonder also if there were any political challenges. Certainly, Zanzibar is complicated and has a complicated history with mainland Tanzania. How was it to work in Djibouti?

LAI: Since there’s no real structure in Djibouti, there’s no one way to make the movie.

But that didn’t really stop me. I raised funds in the public and private sector in Djibouti for my short film and I did the same for the feature film. I was happily very surprised at the response because half of the budget came from Djibouti, and this was the most important part of the budget. Even though there is no cinema there, I made my film over two consecutive summers in 2015 and 2016. All the cast was Djiboutian, 70% of the technicians were from there, and it was entirely shot there. But the Director of Photography and the sound engineer were brought from abroad. I was very surprised by the great response I got. It is also not difficult to shoot in Djibouti, it’s a small city, and I had really a great time doing it except for the summer part. We shot it in July, and it was very hot. This was also possible because my short film had done so well and it meant that even though there is no infrastructure, the people and the government were open to making it happen. They seemed committed to making this industry progress.

BS: And is it fair to say that you are the structure now: I know you work as a line-producer for other film productions and are the go-to person for making films in Djibouti.

LAI: Yes, I do line producing for foreign productions and like Amil was saying, it is very important for me that most technicians and actors are local. It’s the best way to train someone at the same time. You take someone who has fifteen to twenty years of experience in cinema and match them with someone who’s just starting out. That’s the best type of school for that person.

I’m a child of Djibouti so I can look within too. I really wanted to talk about stories that matter here

BS: I am surprised there were no challenges given your somewhat radical treatment of women and women’s lives in both films.

LAI: Yes, there are challenges, of course. When you are doing fundraising, you have to convince the finance people, and that takes a lot of time. It took me almost two years to fundraise. You really have to be driven and patient to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The obstacles for me were always the financial part because it took a lot of my energy. But when it came to trying to film in the country—authorizations and so on—it was easily done. There was no problem on that side. And even when I was talking about a hot subject like these women chewing khat, I didn’t have any problems. It depends on how you tackle the subject itself. You have to know your community, you have to know your society. There’s no use of just telling a story, but you have to tell in a way that once people watch, it can lead to a conversation afterwards. This can only happen if you know your people and how they deal with things.

BS: And Amil, any challenges with the Zanzibari government or was it all pretty smooth?

Still from Vuta N’Kuvute (Tug of War). The gang gets togetherto plan a dangerous trip to the mainland to meet the party.

AS: For the production, no, not at all. It was actually the opposite. They really came through for us. It comes from the sense of creating more autonomy, right? Zanzibaris wants to feel more autonomous in their union with Tanzania and want to feel political and cultural autonomy. This film is very clearly Zanzibari in that way, so there’s been a lot of love and support for the film. Obviously, when I was in the research phase, I knew that even though it is set in the fifties, we realized the necessity of talking about 1964 which is when the Sultanate was overthrown, and this was followed by a massacre. We realized that there’s no way we could talk about it without confronting political issues and potentially even being asked to leave. So there was that bit of a worry. So we made the film in a way that when it ends, the audience is asking, what happened in 1964? Where was Yasmin? Where was Denge? You’re creating a space with your audience, and it’s very much a conversation and about creating a discourse in a space where it becomes safe to talk about something that is completely driven by the state narrative. People are asking questions that they’ve always wanted to ask in a public space.

BS: On hearing this, I do want to hear more about what I sense is a pedagogical imperative with your films. Both of you want to generate conversations within the community. Amil, at one of your screenings you mentioned that you choose this book because it is mandatorily assigned at schools and thus automatically feeds into the film being watched. And Lula, your girl protagonists are students and the whole plot is happening within the educational space. Plus you actually played the high school teacher in Dhalinyaro.

AS: The novel ticked so many boxes for me. I mean, I loved the story; it had the cinematic elements, it already had an audience because everybody reads it in high school, and everyone is curious to see what it looked like visually. But at the same time, we don’t have a market for local cinema, we don’t have the infrastructure for an industry, we don’t have any of those things.

I didn’t want every film to hit the same obstacles that the previous films did. There have to be ways of breaking new barriers, of creating new parts. With this film, there is a market…and I’m using the word “market,” but I don’t mean it in the literal sense, but that there is an audience for this film in my country through schools that exist. So what can this offer? What can this do for creating a younger, cinematically-conscious audience? At the age of sixteen or seventeen, you’re watching this progressive, communist, artistic film in your language made by a Tanzanian filmmaker with a Tanzanian crew and cast. What does that do to somebody? I know what it did to me when I was in university: it changed my life. Maybe it might do the same for a younger audience. That was always kind of the base for this film. What could it do for a new audience who are already exposed to this novel and what would the visuals do? And we’ve been experimenting with that by bringing students to the cinemas, showing it at schools, and it’s been exciting. People in a history class or in a Swahili class are having a conversation with the film, and this is not something I’ve ever seen happen here in Tanzania.

At the age of sixteen or seventeen, you’re watching this progressive, communist, artistic film in your language made by a Tanzanian filmmaker with a Tanzanian crew and cast. What does that do to somebody? I know what it did to me when I was in university: it changed my life.

BS: Yes, and it takes us back to a very Sembene way of thinking since he believed that culture is a tool for social change, whether literature or film in his case. Of course, he gives up on literature and starts to make films because people are not reading his novels—the dock workers and the working-class people that he hopes will read his novels are not reading them. He turns to film and decides that cinema is that tool. So, in a way, having this pedagogical imperative is a type of activism too even though it might not be the same as taking to the streets.

LAI: Yes, of course, it is. I really wanted to talk about young, high school girls in Djibouti. How do they live during the last year in high school in Djibouti? How is it different from young girls from Paris or New York and what do they have in common? What is specific for Djiboutian girls? I wanted to open a little window for someone who’s foreign, for example, and have them see that they’re not so different, after all. <PQ>And, at the same time, I’m Djiboutian so the young girls approach me when they see the film. They are surprised I’m Djiboutian</PQ>, and they find it hard to believe that I’m one of them and that it is possible to do something in your life that you have become hung up on. It was really important for me to be able to tell the next, younger generation, for that young woman who’s beside me that yes, it’s possible, just believe in yourself and things will happen. When I organized different screenings in Djibouti, a lot of young girls came to see me and said they wanted to be in my next film or asked how to become a director. So, I think that’s the main exercise here: trying to tell someone who is in Djibouti who has never been outside or never been abroad that yes, they can do it, and it doesn’t matter where you went to university.

BS: I really love that. Let’s talk a little about the resurgence of East African cinema. Has something changed? Recently, there have been a lot of films from East Africa in festival circuits and many are getting international recognition. There’s a lot of local production as well. There’s also a lot of diaspora investment, creative and financial. I was in Sudan recently and there are so many films being produced whether they are feature films, shorts, or documentaries. What do you think is going on?

AS: Yes, I think it is changing, and I don’t think it’s that recent. We’ve been feeling a wave especially being here on the continent; we’re so much more privy to it. I think it’s changing for the better but still not at the level we would like to be which is fine because I think we’re on the right trajectory. But what I’m seeing now, which is a bit more nuanced, is more African programmers, African curators, and funding for things like development or funding for festival circuits, and also more African film festivals booming. This is important because you can have films being made but where are they being screened? Where are you showing them? When I was in film school, I was hearing about Sissako, Bekolo, and other amazing filmmakers but those are not films that you can access on the continent. You can’t go watch them, you have to go to a festival somewhere in Europe or you have to download it on Torrent or something. Distribution isn’t happening, sales are not happening on the continent, and I see that this is the big change.

In the past ten years, we were able to access more films through our own festivals. <PQ>African filmmakers are putting their foot down and saying, sure, you can do your European screening, but my film also has to find a way into Africa.</PQ> That’s the exciting thing and it is simply because you have filmmakers like Lula, myself, and others who are part of this new wave and are being very vocal about this. We’ve seen what the A-list festivals are like, we know the politics of premier status, we understand the game. And we’re a bit sick and tired of this and we want our films to also play at home. A friend of mine, CJ Obasi is going to Sundance and its exciting because he is the first Nigerian homegrown filmmaker. He also has his own festival through the Surreal-16 Collective in Lagos, but he’s doing a media run for his Sundance Film while arranging screenings in Lagos at the same time. So you see these kinds of things and our generation is very committed to bringing the films back home, and that for me is a big change in the dynamic.

LAI: Yeah, if I could say one thing about this is that people are organizing themselves. They are more aware of their own culture and their own history, and they want to see things through their eyes.

BS: I also wonder why West Africa has historically succeeded more in this area? Is it because of one or two successful filmmakers or is there something missing structurally in East African countries?

AS: I think you have to look at the colonial aspect. In West Africa, there was the Negritude movement which was also about being very French. The colonialism in West Africa was about assimilation and was about how to make this population, this community become French, want to go to France, live in France and so on, whereas in the Anglophone regions, we were in the master-servant relationship. There wasn’t that element of becoming British unless you were the elite. Also when independence comes, the first thing we do, especially in Tanzania, there are these national movements where Kiswahili becomes the national language, tribalism is done away with, and all these colonial aspects are removed from our society. Whether they were successful or not is a whole other story. So even at that time in the seventies and eighties Tanzanian cinema was actually quite strong—it was state-funded, it was critical of socialism and in a more progressive sense, there were films being made. But then you have the second wave of attacks with structural adjustment programs, Bretton Woods institutes, and art suffers and it’s the first thing to go. It took another thirty years but led to imitating Nollywood. They make the Bongo movies that are very much the Anglophone Nollywood model. We took on this model because it’s the one we understood, and we didn’t know the festival circuits whereas in West Africa, they’ve had that relationship with France and Europe where they know festivals, they understand the biennales and so on. They understand all these things but were attempting to get into that as a form of assimilation rather than carving their own identity. Then you have independent filmmakers like Sembene or Mambety who start saying no, let’s make our own cinema. So that school of thought leads to a new kind of filmmaking. Today, I feel like we’re seeing the birth of Tanzanian cinema. We have one or two filmmakers trying to cross borders and make more honest films.

BS: And what about you, Lula? Has the long-standing conflict in Somalia and neighboring regions made it difficult?

LAI: Yes, but at one point, Somalia was very advanced culturally. Hopefully, in the near future, the country will be more stable. More and more young people are doing interesting things and there was even a film festival in Mogadishu. <PQ>This is what I mean when I say that people are more aware, organized, and living their life even though there are bombings left and right. They want to see their history from within.</PQ>

BS: Yes, there is an archive of old Somali films though they are more colonial in nature. But yes, I know it’s complicated to make films in the region. However, Djibouti has become a haven now. I know that The Gravedigger’s Wife was shot there even though the director and the main actors are not from Djibouti.

LAI: Yes, the director is Somali but lives in Finland and the actors are Somali-Canadian but the rest of the cast and crew were Djiboutian. It’s very important to outline that we have Somalia and other big countries that are our neighbors that may or may not be stable, but Djibouti is very peaceful. This is actually why more and more productions are coming to shoot here, and this is important for the insurance companies. For example, Wim Wenders shot his film Submergence in Djibouti, and it was originally supposed to be shot in Kenya.

BS: I wanted to ask how you both felt about the streaming phenomenon. What we get via streamers is not traditionally artistic or beautiful cinema but does the proliferation of streaming services help or hinder?

LAI: I think there’s advantages and disadvantages because when you’re seeing a movie in a theater, it’s a whole experience. It’s not only about watching the film but a whole activity on its own. But at the same time, with streaming, at least the films are being seen so there’s positives and negatives. 

AS: Yes, same, it is positive and negative, especially on the continent. One the one hand, it’s so exciting, you get to watch all these films that were not accessible before for about eight bucks a month. That’s really nice but at the same time we know that these contracts are not great, and we know that the deals being signed are not amazing. We’re being pushed to the corner and we’re not on the decision-making table.

BS: Tell us about the contracts. Why are they bad?

AS: Because we don’t have leverage, right? We don’t have the sales agents or distributors with leverage that can get us good contracts and get us well paid. I don’t believe in selling all your rights unless it’s a really amazing deal. Maybe it’s better for commercial films, but I know that a lot of Nigerian films on there don’t have good deals. In fact, they have very bad deals, but you know Netflix needs the content, they’re desperate for content. I also think it’s seen more as prestige or some kind of ability to market yourself on the continent if you’re on Netflix rather than a real source of income. So that mentality has to change on our side for African filmmakers, and we should be able to negotiate better deals. Also, Netflix uses algorithms for its acquisition and its choice of developing content, and those algorithms are not representative of reality, and they can be quite racist. For example, if they are looking for a Tanzanian film, they’re going to look for what they call the “core audience,” which is the number of people on the map of Tanzania that have actually subscribed to Netflix. But the reality is that more people are watching Netflix shows and films because they’ve burned them or done some kind of piracy. This means that everyone watching them is not subscribed to the service. So for Netflix, the Tanzanian market is extremely tiny according to their numbers, but we know how big it actually is. Basically, it’s all market-driven which is the problem. We’re not dealing with people, we’re dealing with formulas. If we can have a human element involved where I can actually talk to somebody, and they can see what’s happening on the ground, and there’s keen interest in developing local cinema, then things could change. But as it stands right now, it’s great to watch films on there and to access films but it’s not reached the level of actually supporting and developing local content.

BS: What about Netflix Africa?

AS: Well, the three countries that Netflix supports is South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, and they even have development programs now through subsidized organizations and institutes that are supporting developing scripts from those three countries. This is simply because of the subscription base that exists in those three countries. There is literally no other reason and that is frustrating. I mean, it’s good for the filmmakers living in those countries, but it’s not helping the development of African cinema. It’s less risky for Netflix to do this but it is frustrating because they are going to start unequally developing the stories that are being told and the cultures that are being seen on screen. <PQ>It’s very dangerous for that to happen because you’re going to shut out another forty-nine countries from the continent who are not getting a chance to tell their stories.</PQ>

BS: Yes, absolutely.

LAI: This is why every country in Africa should have their own structure. For me, the main obstacle was money for financing a film. African countries must have a way of putting financing so that the young, upcoming filmmakers can find the adequate help that they need. We cannot always look to the neighbor to finance our film. We have to set up things properly so people can talk about their own narratives.

BS: What about the diaspora? I know that they have been instrumental in terms of global viewership but what about with regards to financing and engaging with local material?

LAI: Well, that is great but it doesn’t replace putting in place a governmental, political structure for films. What this means is that the diaspora filmmaker can return and has the opportunity to make their film but a young person who lives in Djibouti or Somalia or Kenya doesn’t have that. That. That is the person that needs to be helped.

BS: A final question: the ocean, the water, the sea…any thoughts on storytelling and the role of the ocean in your films.

AS: I’ve realized that all my films either end or start by the water and this is simply because water means so much whether it’s transport or livelihood or whether it’s language, song, music, food, cuisine. <PQ>We can’t separate ourselves from the sea, and it is such a beautiful metaphor, and it is constantly changing too.</PQ>

LAI: The ocean is part of me. If you ever come to Djibouti, you will see that we are surrounded by the ocean, it is everywhere you look. It is part of my DNA so if it’s not in my films, I feel that something is missing and that I’m not being true to myself.

BS: Thank you, Lula and Amil.