It is telling that the four top-grossing South African movies of all time are all films in which the actor and director Leon Schuster (who made a career out of doing broad slapstick candid camera movies) wears blackface. Also telling is the fact that South African critics barely notice this as an offense (for example, check this reviewer.) It’s no secret that what passes for South African cinema is not representative of the population. (“South African film” effectively exists on television.) In reality, the South African film industry mostly exists as a cheap location for Hollywood and Euro budget films and commercials. Nevertheless, once a black filmmaker enters the system and gets past the money phase, they need to get their films seen. But apart from festival screenings, it is still hard to crack the distribution dilemma. Visit any South African multiplex on any given weekend and look for the local content. Usually not much, unless it is set in an English boarding school or its an Afrikaans musical comedy (mostly thinly disguised rip offs of Hollywood musicals), and you won’t find dramas exploring the social world of the country’s black majority. The rationale is usually “there wasn’t an audience for black South African films.” Last year the South African filmmaker Akin Omotoso–on his previous output, see here–set out to challenge this status quo when he released his romantic comedy, ‘Tell Me Sweet Something.’ The film was a departure for Omotoso, who is known for the hard-hitting social realism of ‘God is African’ and ‘Man on Ground.’ In this feature, a refreshing take on Johannesburg as a place of romance, Omotoso takes a page out of the rom-com playbook and aims for a wide South African audience. Here’s what happened. Below we republish Akin’s public letter on his experience–Dylan Valley, Sean Jacobs.

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Open Letter by Akin Omotoso

Dear Stakeholders,

I am writing this email to bring you up to speed on the situation regarding the movie Tell Me Sweet Something currently in cinemas.

Please permit me a bit of background. In the process of raising funds for this romantic comedy, we are constantly told there wasn’t an audience for black South African films. Our response was, we don’t think the right kind of films are being made for black audiences. Instead of the constant problematizing of black lives we wanted to give audience a positive experience a film about successful, handsome black people falling in love in Joburg, a Joburg re-imagined as a city of love. In other words we set out to disprove this myth.

Tell Me Sweet Something opened on the 4th of September on 47 screens and in five days had reached the million Rand mark and was the number three ranked film by screen average. This article by Destiny testifies to its success. As does this article that first appeared in City Press on Sunday 20th of September.

Films traditionally drop about 40/50% in their second weekend. Tell Me Sweet Something dropped by 23% and finished at no. 5.

Having made the economic case for films like Tell Me Sweet Something, we found ourselves reduced from 47 screens in our third week to 27 screens. Despite this drop in the number of screens Tell Me Sweet Something remained in the Top 10 at no. 10 and still performed better than some of the new titles.

The exhibitor states that it was taken out of sites where the film was not performing and this is totally understandable. However it has now started to be taken out of key sites such as Gateway and Sandton, where the film is performing extremely well, this will have a big impact on the films bottom line. When asked why it was being taken out of site, this was the reply from Mr. Clive Fisher the GM of AcquisitIons and Scheduling replied,

I understand the film is still performing at Sandton, however with only 10 screens and the amount of titles releasing every week we do not have space for the title anymore.

I had another look to try and see if we could load a few shows for the film but unfortunately there is no space.

Sorry.

Thanks

So I’m writing this letter to you to highlight the struggle local films face when trying to build economic arguments. What is the point of an Emerging Filmmaker’s Initiative to boost the industry if this is the response to a film that is performing well? What is the point of local filmmakers growing audiences for our content when the decision to move successful films from key sites is treated like this? What is the point of all the effort the team from Tell Me Sweet Something have put into filling cinemas, when this is the response we get.

This action perpetuates the myth that black films do not do well. What Tell Me Sweet Something began to demonstrate in its first two weeks was that this is not in fact the case.

We need your help to get the exhibitors to re-think their decisions to remove the film from its well performing sites, and to not just treat this as another film, but to contribute to the advancement of South African film in general and to give Black films a fair chance in particular.

What we‘re appealing for is a change in attitude. We will not have economic success if the exhibitor does not change its attitude to black films that are performing well, to understand that it’s the responsibility of us all Filmmakers and Exhibitors to transform the cinema landscape in this country.

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