CINEMA AFRICA 2021 - In Conversation with Filmmaker Seko Shamte

CINEMA AFRICA 2021 - In Conversation with Filmmaker Seko Shamte

Title: CINEMA AFRICA 2021 - In Conversation with Filmmaker Seko Shamte
Abstract: In the german city of Bayreuth, during the winter of 2021, the 13th edition of the CINEMA AFRICA film festival took place. Despite the ongoing pandemic, the team of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence and a group of filmmakers from different corners of the globe were able to showcase five films, that truly showcased the artistic diversity of modern day African filmmaking. With a regional focus on the Indian Ocean, last year's films took us from Tanzania and South Africa to La Réunion and Mauritius, creating a space for stories once overlooked and untold.
During the filmmakers' short stay in Bayreuth, we, the Cluster of Excellence, were able to sit down with each filmmaker to talk about her/his respective works.
In this video Interview Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke talks with Tanzanian filmmaker and producer Seko Shamte about her film, Binti (now on worldwide on Netflix!!). Amongst other things, the filmmaker recalls how audiences connected to the film in many different ways.

Seko Shamte is on Instagram under:
https://www.instagram.com/seko_shamte/

CINEMA AFRICA 2021 Trailer:
https://youtu.be/ic2xULGVZ5A

Cinema Africa Interviews:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlHB4qY36Wi8VczSMvmrDs1zFXoRRh0-

Thanks for Watching!
YouTube playlist: Cinema Africa 2021
Date: February 13, 2023
Language: English
has URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdBXk31NuiM
Transcript: [Music] thank you for for being with me here thank you thank you so much for having me i'm just i'm honored i'm excited i'm just thank you so much clarissa honestly honestly it's it's a real honor to have you here and particularly because it's also very busy and hectic life but before we start i think um please could you shortly introduce yourself my name is i am tanzanian i'm a woman i'm a filmmaker and my latest film is called binti that i'm here to present at cinema africa and i'm extremely extremely excited for everyone to check it out i think we are even more excited and and really happy to have you the film really caught my attention not because i just saw it at the zanzibar film festival being listed i was not there and then i read about it and i read about the director and i read about the crew and um but yeah tell us about the film yeah tell us the story so it's really it's it's a story about four women um from different socio-economic backgrounds in contemporary modern day dar and they're all going through different stages and different um what's the word i'm looking for the each of them have something that they need to overcome and you know towards the end or at the end we see how they're interconnected um so this story is very close to my heart um this is actually the first time as a filmmaker that i've trained my eye on women and i was actually thinking about that when i was thinking whether or not to pursue this um i had never really done anything on contemporary women i feel like a lot of my work my a lot of my earlier work was very male-centric and i hadn't realized that i was actually part of the problem here [Laughter] [Music] um in terms of myself as a woman in the stories that i valued um so doing this was just it was amazing it was my my co-producers were two sisters alinda and angela rupinda they're also tanzanian so it was really about us three women coming together to tell this story about about four women and first of all it was the easiest set that i've ever worked on it was the smoothest collaboration that i've ever had and i think it's just you know amongst you know a lot of times when you picture film sets or even the pre-production process there's a lot of a lot of yelling a lot of you know everyone trying to get their own way because there are a lot of egos involved and not to say that women don't have eagles we do but i think for for us three women working together it just it flowed it flowed um and you know even on the day when we premiered we were really talking about how easy it is to to work together and how in many many times women are discouraged from working together they're like oh women are complicated they're different they're difficult to work with you know but it was really just one of one of the best experiences of my life yeah did you deliberately team up only with women for that film because you could have also i mean just imagine you you could have also told like like a very female centered story or stories yeah but not necessarily kind of translating this as well into a philosophy of how your crew should look like true this is true but i think uh it wasn't no it wasn't really deliberate because uh angela and i we had you know she lived in l.a for a really long time and she was working out there and then she was like i want to come home and i'm like well i'm already home and um she was like we gotta work on something together so we collaborated on this very very short uh film that she wrote it was about seven minutes long called midnight and then when we saw how well we worked together we were like okay now we gotta take it to to the feature level after this so then we we were like we work well together so initially it wasn't really it was a happy coincidence that we ended up working then you know she brought in her sister as well as a producing partner so at the end it became a happy coincidence that three women were working together it was not initially by design okay but after but afterwards we're like yeah that was that was awesome and we'll do it again perfect so this lucky coincidence was really a lucky coincidence yes then and you said yourself you kind of so to say you were part of the problem as you said but you also realized that it was so important to tell these stories could you could you tell me a bit how the film has changed perceptions probably your own also in the process of making it but also if we look at the wider reception yeah i mean for me it was just very transformative um i just like i said i never really worked in that capacity and also working you know when we were writing when angela and i were writing as well because you know we were in the right i'd never worked with a writing partner before i usually shoot the things i write alone um so that was also awesome because then i think our we really bonded because we as we were writing each each storyline we were really talking to each other and really being vulnerable and really opening up and i think we got to see different sides of each other that um under normal circumstances as friends we maybe would not have had an occasion to have that kind of vulnerability yeah um and so that immediately was started transforming me because i'm not a very i'm a pretty closed off person actually i mean i talk a lot but i if you listen closely like i'm not really talking that much about like my interior world i'm not going to try to improve your posterior world so it was it was beautiful because then i was able to really start you know opening up to to my friends and opening up to people and then you know after we'd have a writing session or talk to my my best friends and my close friends i'd be like oh we were talking about this and then you know they're also like oh you know this happened to me so it really also started amongst ourselves right it was a good starting point for having these vulnerable conversations and then when we premiered i actually um uh usually when the film is playing or any of my films are playing i never sit inside um i just get too nervous i'm like oh well the jokes land will they understand what i meant by that you know so i get into my head a lot so it's better for me to just sit outside and then when it's done i go back inside [Music] um so i was sitting outside and i'm nervously waiting and of course you know because i also edited the first kind of the first and final part of the film i kind of knew every single you know every single nuance every so i it was somewhere around i remember about 28 minutes and i knew exactly what was happening when i saw this woman um come out of the theater and i was like oh gosh are people leaving what's happening here but she came out and she just started shaking and crying it was her own story yeah all right at first i was like what's happening and then she saw me she came over and she gave me a deep hug and she cried and cried i remember it was the premiere so we were all dressed up in my dress and her mascara and her foundation and it was bald it was a very it was such a human moment right there and i feel a little teary-eyed right now talking about it because you know again this is someone that i've known and you know she came to the premiere she's i mean in tanzania she's this exceptional model and socialite and again you know i never knew that there was so much that was going on in her life and this kind of broke that open and again we ended up for 15 minutes having this very deep conversation which we never had and i've known her for 20 years um so then she went back inside and that's when i was like okay i think tanzanian women are really really responding to this um and then afterwards you know when we did the q a and everyone a lot of women came up to me tanzanian women and they were like thank you for representing us and some of the men as well um came up to me and i remember one telling me you know my mom went through you know what this character went through and you know as a teenager in my early 20s i i never really paid attention i was never really you know i never really understood what it meant to be in her shoes until this moment you know and so yeah i've been having a lot of and even when it was in theaters um in tanzania i mean people would dm me these really really long um messages and sometimes i'll be a little because you know i'm a filmmaker you know i'm not a therapist but i would have been wrong and i'll just kind of read them and i'll be like i'm not sure what to you know how do i even reply to this yeah yeah but that also means that there was a deep kind of lack i mean and probably then then women really found that okay there is a space there is a kind of a platform created for us yes for all our if i look at the film also our traumas yeah and that was important and you know like i said you know a lot of a lot of my my earlier films they were you know well researched like quite cerebral and quite masculine and people would even be like oh i really liked it but i there was never a situation where we were having this type of bond um with you know a creator in the audience i've never had that before until this film yeah right before the interview we actually talked about how very often well not only tanzania i think it's probably a global phenomenon the reception of films or even the way yeah i think it's the reception and the consumption is so also gendered that in a sense men don't even consider as as you told us before men don't even consider a film made by women absolutely or music produced by women and what about has that changed with binti what what where saw the male reactions to the film the real reactions were interesting um uh a lot of them i mean the ones that you know i spoke to really liked it and for a lot of them they were like well huh is this what we've been doing i wasn't aware you know i think you know when you look at when you as a human being you can justify every single action that you make right knowing knowing your past knowing your traumas knowing the baggage that you carry um sometimes you have to get outside of yourself and see something that's when you're like okay but that's actually wrong um and so a lot of conversations that i had with men about the film were along those lines where they're reconsidering um some of their approaches towards relationships towards their children and i thought that was really i thought that was really interesting yeah although even if i look at the film also the male roles in there are very different so you also leave men i think a spectrum yes yes to discuss and to identify with or also to reject probably yeah and you know it's like i was very cognizant i mean i i don't want to make a film that you know it's bashing men so of course i had to really balance the characters as well i wanted one to be one extreme one to be the other as well you know to balance it out that it's not a blanket you know but they are they're good and not so good and and yeah to give men fair play so they don't they don't walk away thinking we've been attacked no nobody you know have their guard up and be like uh this feminist movie is attacking me it's like no no one is attacking you that's why i wanted to make sure that the characters were also really balanced yeah i mean i think the film shows as well how they can also be victims of this patriarchal society absolutely yeah absolutely i think that's that's really the beauty of it um well tanzania compared for instance to a country like nigeria is not too much known for film production of course there is lots of so to say popular film production yeah and i think we all know the series so to say that we all watch and lots of people from different classes also watch but the feature film is really a rare thing still can you say something about that how is it as a film director in this um yeah in in this kind of context no it's an exciting time it's an exciting time i think that you know for those of us who've been at this i mean i have been at this since really my first kind of uh my first feature i did in 2015 but my first kind of big film production i did in 2011. so it's been 10 years in for me um and so for those of us who really started we're finally starting to see something come with it you know only a few years ago did we start finding finally going to the festivals but you know so for us we're going through a lot of firsts right now and um now because on the continent we the platforms are there uh amazon prime is there netflix is doing really good work right now so it's it's becoming a more viable more viable profession i would say um because i mean even for me telling my parents oh i want to be a filmmaker they were like good jokes how are you going to make a living are you going to be able to look after yourself um but my mom who's an amazing writer 10 50 100 times better than i'll ever be she really encouraged it my dad's an engineer and he was just kind of like doesn't seem very practical to me but you know they were supportive and so now i think because our class um are starting to to break through i think that for the people who are now coming i think we'll see a lot more women filmmakers a lot more tanzanian filmmakers as now we're finding new avenues to actually make it viable yeah so what's the next project for you then oh my gosh i i i've got i've got four i've written four scripts i think in the past four months um yeah it's been a productive thing i've been in a productive phase but the one that i like the most is the one that i have one that i wrote last week when i was flying home from nigeria to dar salaam i really like that i know that i really want to do a mini series on um our first president his wife and doing deep dive uh deep character study um over you know four or five episodes um hoping to do that luck if if i can with a platform um because i feel like nier is really lost in the mandelas and then kruma's you know like nobody never be like huh maybe maybe africans mostly know near but even even even that's kind of starting to fade um and i think his legacy is just so incredible in what he was able to do with liberating southern africa and unifying east africa i think there's so much that i want to talk i want to talk about when it comes to him um there's a script that i wrote about eight years ago about world war one as it was fought in tanzania because again you know these are things that people are not aware of that you know that even on our shores we actually had battles in east africa and you know some some of the graves are still there and so the stories are still there and so to find a way to kind of interview i i'm really interested in history so you know i also want to do something something epic and you know but told from our perspective of us being there in this war coming to our shores and what that did to those areas and it's actually the coast and what that did to to that coastal yeah but the portuguese actually they fought their first battle in in africa not in europe not even the first world war yeah i mean it was tremendous involved so many thousands of people yeah and what does and so you know you know what does that look like for us or you know the people who are there um when you're kind of like minding your own business and you go into your backyard and this cannon just lands in your backyard when you're maybe trying to put up you know some some laundry or some washing um and then to try and figure out so what exactly is this war about and how how do we figure into this um so there's something that i wrote a while ago that i also want to kind of bring bring to fruition yeah wow great i mean i think it's it's very important also to really tell these stories i mean these historical stories i think even in tanzania he has become like a symbol yeah but that also means that it kind of forecloses a kind of view on on on certain aspects and certain contributions he made he made and i think just to reveal the complexities i think there's always an issue if you say well this leader was good right you know i'm okay well he did a lot of good things but the bot but you know you want to lay bear the comprehension his humanity and so i'm really really interested in doing that but in mini series form so i'm gonna try and fight for that wow okay well all the best for all these interesting projects and thank you so much for this beautiful conversation thank you thanks thank you for having me thank you you

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