Women in mobile film making are honored for their creative work

Cleo Matuwane walks away with a grand price for her wonderful mobile film at Father Louise Blondel, Diepsloot. Picture: Wot-if trust.

Maleka Charles

With the Fourth Industrial Revolution swiftly finding its way within the borders of many townships across South Africa, women have seemingly grabbed the system by its balls mostly to their advantage.

Wot if trust together with the Two spinning wheels on Friday, ran a mobile film showcase in Diepsloot to honor women in film from around the community for their ostentatious work and creativity, in using mobile phones to tell their stories.

In a statement released by Wot-if trust on Wednesday, the organization said its main objective was aimed at empowering women as well as helping them with training and mentorship programs provided by its partners.

“One of the key objectives of the Wotif trust is to empower women in the Diepsloot community.”

“One of the ways we do this is by arranging training and mentorship programmes provided by our partners for young women in sectors where they are underrepresented."

Shelly Barry of The two spinning wheels said she was speechless and excited to witness the work young women in Diepsloot have done especially in using smartphones to narrate their own stories, something she termed a new wave of African film making.

“Witnessing the films made by the young sister from Diepsloot today, there are no words.”

“Except that it is with immense gratitude that the path of this life time has led me to having a small part of play in the new wave of African film making, viva the mobile phone viva!”

Talking about whether the content should be monetized or not, Gail Styger founder and trustee for Wot if trust said although monetizing might be a little bit challenging, they are willing to convince corporate businesses to advertise on their contents once they hit huge numbers on social media.

“The monetizing is challenging, we need to get corporate to advertise on content that is being created to say, that piece of content on Facebook is getting thousand hits a day.”

Styger said if they could produce local content, they’d find a way of creating a movie theater in Diepsloot, where people can watch a movie at an affordable price.

“On a Monday night when we went to a 48 film festival, we realized local people like local content.”

“So there is a market here and we need to find a way of creating a movie theater, we can have movies once a week, where we start creating that culture.”

“And people can pay twenty rand or something like that,” she said.

Thoriso Ngwatwane, whose film was also screened, was amongst the ten women who were honored for their work as women in film and received certificates for completing a short training program in mobile phone film making.

“Honestly we are the face of these stories and we need to start speaking them, and we need to start speaking them out loud.”

This was a good way to wrap up the women's month in style and it is evident that women are now lording it over in the male dominated industry as the digital film makers in South Africa.