by Thinus Ferreira
South Africa's new sports, arts and culture minister Gayton McKenzie on Friday slammed South Africa's National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of, and funded by, his department "saying there's a big problem at the National Film and Video Foundation".
"We don't have blockbuster films. There's Hollywood. Nollywood. You have Bollywood. Where's Mzansiwood? Those are the questions we are going to ask. It can't be that all the people in the arts are complaining," Gayton McKenzie said on Friday in an eNCA (DStv 403) interview outside parliament.
"There must be a problem there. We must address that problem. We are here to fix things. We are not here for self-aggrandisement. We are here to fix stuff and to work together."
On Wednesday, Gayton McKenzie posted an image of South African writers at an airport, noting that "The second group of South African writers arrived in Turkey, en route to Venezuela. I removed myself and a few officials from the list to make space for more writers and this is how things will be going forward at the department of sports, arts and culture".
In June South African filmmakers reacted with fury over the NFVF's latest red carpet champagne junket to the 77th Cannes Film Festival - a visit that once again excluded media, but included a gaggle of NFVF and other officials and cost millions.
Adding insult to injury: It took the NFVF a month after returning to South Africa to put out a badly done, bland press release about what the NFVF did in Cannes, with no exposure or local coverage in the media about what the NFVF's work and interaction there entailed.
The NFVF - funded by South African taxpayers, spent big to take 40 people from South Africa's film industry together with NFVF staffers and acting NFVF CEO Thobela Mayinje to the French Riviera for so-called "exposure" and networking.
NFVF chairperson Tholoana Ncheke-Mahlaela also went along.
Sixteen delegates from provincial officers from the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, under which the KZN Film Commission, the Durban Film Office (DFO) and Wesgro, as well as officials from other organisations like the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and the Eastern Cape Development Corporation (ECDC) went along. It's not clear what they did.
Following international flights and expensive French hotel accommodation, champagne glasses were filled during the 11-day festival at cocktail events, including a "first-ever intimate networking cocktail event" at the Bistrot de Lérins.
In response to a media query from TVwithThinus the NFVF didn't want to say how much money the NFVF spent on the overseas Cannes junket or where everyone stayed in Cannes.
Lerato Mokopanele, NFVF spokesperson said the NFVF paid for 22 filmmakers and five NFVF staffers and their travel and accommodation costs to go to the Cannes Film Festival.
As to why Tholoana Ncheke-Mahlaela went and attended, the NFVF said she was invited by South Africa's embassy in France to attend the Cannes film festival as part of a delegation from South Africa to promote South Africa as a film destination and that she was also invited by the Indian government to give a speech at the festival's Bharat pavilion.
For more than a year and a half since March 2023, the NFVF has been without a permanent CEO since Makhosazana Khanyile left.
