Zanzibar International Film Festival
Zanzibar’s celebration of
CINEMA RETURNS Great news for film lovers and Zanzibar’s hospitality industry: after a Covid-enforced break in 2020, the Zanzibar International Film Festival returns in July – albeit in a truncated, socially distanced fashion. Mark Edwards speaks to its director, award-winning filmmaker Martin Mhando, about how the event celebrates the shared experience of cinema.
gives locals and tourists a cherished opportunity to see films on the big screen at some spectacular pop-up locations while championing the work of emerging filmmakers from Africa and the Dhow Countries along the shores of the Indian Ocean, whose maritime trade routes over the centuries have done so much to create Zanzibar’s unique cultural mix.
year with the Zanzibar International Film Festival (Ziff). The public event
role in “keeping alive the embers of the cinema culture” in Tanzania and
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Sharing our heritage Ziff was launched in 1998 – just a couple of years after the last Tanzanian cinema had bitten the dust – and is now East Africa’s biggest film festival, reaching around 50,000 people each year through its screenings, workshops and associated events such as live music concerts and dhow races. The festival’s director, filmmaker and academic Martin Mhando, believes over the years it has played a pivotal
Reggae star Shaggy is among the music acts who have performed at the festival
being “a cosmopolitanising agent of the Zanzibar community”. “For many years Ziff was the only space in Zanzibar where you would be able to sit with hundreds of people to enjoy a film screening,” he says. “The 1980s saw the closing down of cinemas across the continent and festivals became the home of all lovers of cinema. Film has helped people who would otherwise be estranged from the rest of the world and in that way,
©Peter Bennett
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ime was when there were more than 50 cinemas across Tanzania and a night at the movies was one of the most popular pastimes in the country. Many would fall in love there – either with their date that evening or the wonders on the screen with Hollywood or Bollywood blockbusters transporting them to another world. However, rising ticket prices made cinema trips prohibitively expensive for all but a few and by the mid-1990s all cinemas had been closed down. Today a handful of exclusive modern multiplexes have sprung up, but they have little to link them to the country’s cinematic heyday. Away from the mainland, Zanzibar currently has no operating cinemas at all, yet the magic of the movies arrives on the archipelago each
