History has been made as Theatre in the Park in partnership with Hivos are successfully hosting the first ever edition of the annual International Film Festival Rotterdam in Sub Saharan Africa.
There was a lot of skepticism around the hosting of the event because the first six films from Europe which were on their ‘African Premiere’ were to be live streamed from Rotterdam, Netherlands.
With our not so stable internet connections locally, many thought it was impossible but with great team work and feverous determination, the hosts managed to pull it off.
All the six films ran as scheduled and there weren’t any buffering issues to worry about.
This bold live streaming venture has given birth to a whole new concept of distributing films locally.
Instead of an individual having to do a national tour where they have to take their film from city to city physically, they can just do one mega premiere at a location of their choice and live stream to audiences in other cities as well as the world at large.
This development comes at a time when the film sector is on the verge of a major boom – with a lot of filmmakers churning out some very palatable productions with the very limited resources they have.
Moving on, the festival continues this week with Zimbabwean classics lined up daily till February 3.
To kick start the programme will be a film whose producers were very innovative in terms of distributing it and it is ‘Lobola’.
The other films to be screened are ‘Neria’, ‘Flame’, ‘Playing Warriors’ ‘Mind Games’ and ‘Cook Off’. All films start at 7 pm.
Below is the schedule for the week:
