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New film archive with African focus in Kimberley.
(Article in Sunday Independent of 8 Oct 2006)

A new film archive and study centre, dedicated to African film, has been set up at the William Humphreys Art Gallery. It will also be a site for film festivals with an African focus, the first of which is planned for July 2007.

It has been boosted by a donation, announced last week by Mike Dearham, M-Net's head of sales and acquisitions, of copies of 300 African films bought by M-Net from sources round the world.

The opening took place in Kimberley last week. The WHAG films project is the first of its kind to be based at an art gallery in South Africa.

The project was initiated by Gail Robbins, the founder of Victoria West's Apollo film festival in 2000.

The WHAG project was arranged in collaboration with the director of the gallery, Ann Pretorius; it has been funded by the transformation fund of the department of Arts & Culture and both Ster-Kinekor and M-Net are supporting it.

Already, an elegant 120-seat screening facility and a library with research screening facilities has been established in the gallery.

All arts and artists build on the past, and film - perhaps more evanescent than most, chiefly because distribution and exhibition is commercially based - is vulnerable to loss of memory.

This in turn represents elimination of example for emerging artists and audiences. The equivalent would be trying to study or create literature with no books available from more than 20 years ago.

Major African films have passed into the ownership of foreigners - a consequence of a dependence on foreign funding - and are never seen. This is one of the reasons that M-Net has been buying up the rights of African films, Dearham said. They are regarded as both a continental and national heritage and are a source of inspiration to emerging film-makers - and other artists.

In addition, film is an established area of study at secondary and tertiary levels. The WHAG library will stimulate this.

WHAG is the first South African art gallery to treat cinema as an extension of the visual arts.