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Peter Tanyanyiwa Arts Correspondent
Zimbabwe will soon carry out domestic resources mobilisation in an effort to improve and encourage good and quality content creation in the local film industry.
Speaking at the Indian cultural festival event dubbed, “Namaste Zimbabwe Cultural Festival 2022,” at 7 Arts Theatre on Tuesday, Deputy Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Kindness Paradza said serious efforts were going to be employed to boost content creation in the country.
“With the recent licensing of many broadcasting channels, they are going to need a lot of content and as the Government we are going to carry out what we call domestic resources mobilisation programme,” he said.
“This is so that we can improve our local film industry taking lessons from the successful Indian Bollywood multi-billion dollar industry. Our exchange programmes with India will also go a long way in trying to bridge the gap between our two nations and the two film industries.”
Deputy Minister Paradza said the Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Monica Mutsvangwa was recently invited to India and the nation was taking notes as the ministry aimed to improve everything and challenge other film power houses across the globe.
“With Bollywood and the local Zimbabwean film industry working together, we can challenge the Hollywood multi-billion-dollar industry,” he said.
“As far as exchange programmes are concerned, we have our own film school here in Zimbabwe, and we have the national broadcaster, ZBC, which has been producing some very good documentaries, so we want to strongly link them with our Indian counterparts in the new year, 2023. We are also hoping to develop the film school so that it can accommodate more creative minds.
“We want to develop the local film industry so that we match our counterparts, our Indian counterparts. The Minister of Information was there recently and she brought a lot of new ideas which we are going to explore.
“We are confident that working together with India, in time we can even challenge the Hollywood multi-billion-dollar industry. In terms of funding we are going to think outside the box, as we aim to revive the movie industry. We are going to invest more on content production as we need more world class, good quality productions especially for the recently licensed channels.” Indian Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Mr Vijay Khanduja said India and Zimbabwe were going to make strides in the film industry which will also benefit the tourism sectors of the two countries.
“We are going to ensure that Bollywood and the local Zimbabwean film industry have strong and close ties so that the two countries can complement each other,” he said. “This will also go a long way in boosting the tourism sectors of the two nations, hence we are so excited to work together with our Zimbabwean counterparts.”
The cooperation between the two countries in film has a potential to usher a film-induced tourism sector boom to Zimbabwe’s tourist destination image.
Film tourism can be used in improving Zimbabwe’s tourist destination image, but this will need collaboration between local filmmakers, television channels and the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) so they can properly play their key role of influencing people’s images and perceptions of the destination, especially prior to their arrival.
The concept of film tourism is part of the pop culture phenomena which includes books and music.
India and Zimbabwe have a long history of close and cordial relations
Online Reporter