Kenya’s rough road to coveted Oscars

Sports and The Arts, two sectors that share a ministry, make a rather unlikely pair. They are akin to siblings who are about the same age but of whom one has matured early and shot to prominence, as the other has plodded slowly behind, woefully underdeveloped for his years.

While sports, with superstar fields such as athletics seeing signs of early maturation from as early as the 1968 when Kenya won its first Olympic gold medal in Mexico City; it was only in 2014 with the win of Lupita Nyong’o at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscars), that the arts began to achieve seeming global prominence.

As Jim Shamoon, Executive Producer of Blue Sky Films observes: “Even after more than 50 years of independence, we have not produced a single film in Kenya that has broken even financially. We have never produced a movie that would be of a quality and standard high enough to compete with the best in the world.”

2018 saw some excitement in film circles given the nomination of Watu Wote, a German production, filmed in Kenya, with a Kenyan cast, crew, and storyline, for the Best Short Live Action Film at the Oscars.

For Wambui Kairo, current Chairperson of the Kenya Oscar Selection committee, it was a great step forward. “Watu Wote was a German production serviced by Kenyans. But we still celebrate it because it is the epitome of where we want to go. I am optimistic that if Watu Wote, a little short film came this close to be nominated, sooner or later a Kenyan production will get there. The fact that the Oscars are beginning to celebrate diversity and to look outside the box, following the criticism of #OscarsSoWhite, makes me think that things are falling into place. Sooner or later, we’ll get there.”

To date, three Kenyan movies have been submitted for the Oscars: Heart of Fire (2009), Nairobi Half Life (2012), and Kati Kati (2016). Heart of Fire was rejected due to its predominantly non-Kenyan crew, while of the two submissions accepted — Nairobi Half Life and Kati Kati — none got to the nomination stage.

“I wish we had feedback from the academy but we don’t. Maybe it’s that the other stories are better told, have better cinematography, better production, and our films don’t meet this standard.” says Wambui.

Ginger Wilson, producer of the said submitted movies does not think their failure to proceed was due to their artistry, but simply due to an inability to garner enough attention among academy members.

“I was at a meeting with a voting academy member in Los Angeles this week and we discussed this. He said it’s all to do with awareness of the movie itself at the time of voting. Proper awareness of one’s film requires a publicity campaign.

“If the movie has been nominated and won other awards or if it is issue based on something with current relevance, that also helps. Voters have to know your film to vote for it.”

Martin Munyua, Secretary General of the Kenya Film Television Professionals Associations concurs: “Nowadays, when costing your film, if doing it for the international market, you have to have a budget for marketing. Buying ads on social and main stream media and continuously pushing it out into the public. The ratio now has come to 50:50. If it cost you $50 million to make, spend $50 million on marketing. You and your cast have to travel for festivals, you have to give interviews, you have to avail yourselves for talk shows. Seeing actors on Oprah and Ellen and on key magazines is not accidental, there’s a team of marketers behind it.”

INTERNATIONAL STUDIOS

The rush by the big international studios to have their productions win global awards has been likened to nothing less than a political campaign. It has been said to get so cut-throat and heated as to put actual politicians to shame. Professional Oscar campaign strategists exist in large numbers, helping studios plan out how to make sure their productions get before the eyes of voting members, most of whom work regular day time jobs and might end up too swamped to watch all the movies submitted. Variety magazine, a publication focused on the entertainment sector, put the budget for a studio funded campaign as costing anywhere between $3 million and $10 million. Ginger singles out this obstacle film maker’s encounter, that their colleagues in the sports world do not — the need for humongous capital.

“At first glance it’s easy to think that certain geographical areas produce better films but that may not be the case. Some just have more financial support from their governments. Often the film commission of the entrants’ country will support with funding but our commission does not have any money.”

Jim Shamoon echoes this: “We have to start looking at it as it is. We can’t make Hollywood blockbusters in one day. Hollywood blockbusters cost up to $100 million to make and market.”

Moving forward, there is much to be done.

“We have a new Cabinet Secretary and so first of all we should push the film policy which will see rebates, tax exemptions and innovative financing beyond loans be adopted. Right now I have seen that there has been an attempt to come up with a loan for the creative sector but I don’t believe a loan is enough to encourage it due to lack of security; there are no guarantees to how art will sell. The best thing would be to give grants,” opines Martin Munya.

Jim shares advice which the late British producer Simon Channing Williams shared when he was in Kenya shooting The Constant Gardener. “We were being interviewed on KTN and he said, if you have talent, write a 10 minute film, get your friends together and do it, and put it into the festival circuit. If you have any talent at all, you will win things, and when you win things, people like me will come looking for you.”

Ginger Wilson also believes this is a viable option: “We could really encourage Kenyans to now go make their own short films and enter them as they could follow the route Watu Wote took.”

The history of Kenya’s arts and culture sector goes hand in hand with the history of the governance of Kenya. For a long time, the arts and the government have had an antagonistic relationship and it is only in recent years that peace has been brokered. The Kenyatta and Moi regimes cracked down on writers, musicians, and playwrights who produced work that appeared to portray the government in bad light.

Not only did the government not pay any attention to setting up or nurturing a local creative economy, it deliberately stamped on and exiled the more politically conscious artists. It is only recently that attempts to revive the sector have been in vogue.

FINANCIAL RETURNS

The potential for financial returns from Kenya’s creative economy if invested in adequately, are best understood in the context of a report released this week by America’s non-partisan Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), showing that in a single year, the US arts and culture sector contributed $763.6 billion to the US economy, more than the entire GDP of Switzerland. That translates into 4.2 per cent of the US economy, suggesting that the arts and culture sector is worth almost as much as the food and agriculture industry.

As the excitement about the Oscars dies down, it is hoped propping up and promoting local awards and festivals such as Kalasha Festival, Slum Film Festival, Riverwood Awards, among others, will further build the capacity of local film makers.

Maybe one day, Kenya will not only be known for its athletics, or its tea, or its flowers, maybe, the stunted younger brother called the arts, will one day stand tall.