Why are more films focused on SA?
With the enormous success of South African director Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, with big-budget Hollywood film like Safe House being set in Cape Town, America has turned its eye very firmly to South Africa. We’ve had musicians like Seether and Dave Matthews make it big overseas, too.
The question is what does South Africa offer the world?
Creative genius
From Oscar-winning actresses to renowned directors, we’ve provided the world with amazing talent. We’ve also given the world two Nobel Prize winning authors, scientists, etc. For a large, thriving, and powerful entity such as Hollywood, which is constantly seeking new resources to mine, this serves as a perfect hive for such talent.
Our troubled history has also resulted in astounding creativity, due to many people finding artistic outlets as powerful forms of escape and commentary. Today we benefit from that and from being taught by those very same people.
Environment
With a wide range of climate, from very cold to Mediterranean, South Africa also offers a diverse set of locations within a small area. Giant mountains, ocean, forest, fields, wildlife: all these are within driving distance. Philip Key, who did large parts of the film Safe House, explains to The Independent the benefits of using South Africa – specifically Cape Town – for Hollywood.
“Many of the richer cities in the world are in the northern hemisphere, so shooting in their winter – our summer months – is trickier. The South African currency is generally weakfish [sic], so that makes us economically appealing to movie centres in Europe and the States. And our cosmopolitan population makes it easy to shoot something that requires a range of racial types.”
So, because the dollar does well, it can be used in their winter, and with large variety of sets and population ethnicity, South Africa is a perfect location. Everything from benefiting tourists who use online tax free shopping to benefiting our GDP all shows the mutual rewards of using South Africa.
For us of course it has enormous benefits: it stimulates the economy via tourism and investment, since it shows the world that we are a high functioning society. The FIFA World Cup also did this – even if it, in some areas, the loss was more than the gain from implementation.
South Africa has much to offer the world. We’d hope that our talent doesn’t remain overseas the entire time (what people sometimes call “brain drain”). But we also must remember we need to do things to keep the talent here, with better rewards and focus. While it’s wonderful to have Hollywood make their films here, we must also find ways so that our films and arts and creative endeavours make it good for the world stage, too.
Image credit: Wikipedia