African filmmakers head to DIFF

9 Jul 2013

The 34th Durban International Film Festival (DIFF), hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts, University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, with principal funding by the National Lottery Development Trust Fund, has finalised the selection of participants for the 6th edition of the Talent Campus Durban which takes place from 19-23 July 2013.

40 African filmmakers and film experts will come together in Durban to be inspired and enlightened in the medium and industry of cinema. The programme provides the selected participants with a unique opportunity to meet with international industry professionals, experts and mentors in various aspects of the filmmaking business through participation in a 5-day programme of masterclasses, workshops and industry networking events.

This year's candidates, chosen from over 450 submissions, hail from 15 different African countries, including Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uganda. Participants will be also be able to attend the DIFF.

Training programmes

Running in parallel to the general Festival programme, this year's Talent Campus Durban will offer three hands-on training programmes: Doc Station which will focus on documentary-making, Talent Press which is dedicated to film criticism and Script Station which will foster story development.

For the third consecutive year, Doc Station will offer three selected Talents the opportunity to refine and polish documentary projects for pitching at the 4th Durban FilmMart's DOC Circle. Meanwhile, Talent Press will mentor four African journalists in the art of film criticism with access to all the screenings of the 34th Durban International Film Festival.

This initiative, promoted in collaboration with FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) and the Goethe Institute of South Africa, will welcome film writing experts Didi Cheeka (Nigeria), Espera Donouvossi (Benin and South Africa), Leon Van Nierop (South Africa) and Katarina Hederen (Ethiopia and South Africa) as programme mentors.

For the first time, Script Station will offer the opportunity to four selected writers to develop their stories in the Writers Circle, while being mentored by qualified script editors Tracey Lee Dearham-Raniers and Karima Effendi. This new activity is presented in collaboration with the NFVF's Sediba SPARK Scriptwriting workshop.

In 2013, the Talent Campus Durban theme is "Memetic Africa?" highlighting and interrogating the continent of Africa as a source of myriad narratives which offer possibilities to be re-imagined, re-told, overlapped and adapted within numerous contexts.

Talent Campus Durban is presented in partnership with the Berlinale Talent Campus, with support from the German Embassy of South Africa, the Goethe-Institut of South Africa, and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Economic Development and Tourism. Through the international programme, which extends to Talent Campuses in Buenos Aires, Guadalajara, Sarajevo and Tokyo, as well as Durban, participants are initiated into a global community of filmmakers and connected via a wide social network operated through the Berlinale.

Talent Campus Durban 2013 participants can be found at www.durbanfilmfest.co.za/2013-talent-campus-durban.

For more, go to www.durbanfilmfest.co.za