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Clodine Manyozo Entertainment Reporter
The Zimbabwe International Film Festival Trust (ZIFFT) is going around the country documenting local history.
This follows a realisation that most stories of traditional chieftainships, clans, spirit mediums and cultures have been left undocumented.
ZIFFT founder and executive director, Nigel Munyati, said he had a vision of creating a database that could be tapped into by local producers.
“It has always been my dream come true to collect the history of my people,” he said. “When our history is told by foreigners many important things are left out, so I’m going around the country gathering this information so that it will be easy for film makers to tell our stories and make films based on our history and historic figures like Nyatsimba Mutota.
“We are visiting a lot of places, talking to different chiefs like Chief Mangwende in Murehwa and Chief Kazangarare in Hurungwe. Through this, we are hearing some stories that we never imagined.”
Munyati and his team got the privilege to record a spirit medium in action.
“Spirit mediums do not like to be recorded when they are in action but we got lucky and got the chance to record one of them,” he said.
“We would wake up in the early hours of the morning to go to the medium’s cave to shoot. The experience though amazing, may be scary to some thus it needs a strong heart.”
Munyati said he had also been documenting different migrations that happened throughout history.
“It has been an eye-opening journey noting how, throughout history, people have moved around, and how that still impacts on our different cultures,” he said.
“Some people do not know where the genre of sungura came from and how people from Zambia and Mozambique impact our culture.”
Many local filmmakers have been specialising in fiction and drama series as opposed to filming informative documentaries.
“Making documentaries on local history is not easy. Some have failed due to financial challenges, while bureaucracy has also remained a huge hindrance,” said Munyati.
Online Reporter