By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 06

Thirteen films chosen from more than two hundred scripts are less a scatter of projects than a single curated body of work.

A magazine editor commissions a set of pieces, chooses among many more than run, and publishes the survivors as one edition with a shape. The film slate announced on 6 July 2022 can be read the same way: thirteen Namibian films selected from more than two hundred submissions, a commissioned body of content rather than a loose scatter of unrelated projects.

Read as an edition, the slate has an editorial logic worth examining – how it was selected, what it chose to include, and what its existence says about a film pipeline that has rarely produced work at this scale in one go.

Two hundred scripts, thirteen films

The funnel is the first thing to notice. A call went out in March 2022 with a submission deadline of 25 March, and more than two hundred proposals came back, of which thirteen were commissioned. That is a selection rate of roughly one in fifteen, closer to a competitive commissioning round than an open subsidy handing money to all comers.

A funnel that steep says two useful things at once. There is far more writing ambition in the country than there is production capacity to realise it, and the commissioners were willing to reject most of what they received, which is what makes the result an edited set rather than a quota filled. It also means twelve or thirteen scripts were turned away for every one that ran, a reserve of unmade work that a second round could draw on without a fresh appeal.

One in fifteen scripts made the cut, which makes the slate a curated selection rather than a subsidy.

A commissioned set, not a festival line-up

The difference between this slate and a festival programme is direction. A festival gathers finished films that already exist; this commission decided in advance what kind of work it wanted and paid to bring it into being. That gives the thirteen a coherence a festival cannot engineer – they answer a common brief, share distribution and arrive together.

That coherence is what lets the slate be read as a single edition. The titles differ, but they were chosen by one editorial hand for one audience and one set of channels, which is precisely how a magazine issue is assembled from separate articles into something with a through-line.

A commission chooses its contents in advance, which is what a festival by its nature cannot do.

The genres as a running order

The brief allowed comedy, family drama, action and romantic comedy, all suitable for family viewing, and the slate spreads across them. That spread functions like a running order, balancing lighter and heavier pieces so the whole set serves a broad household audience rather than a narrow taste.

The family-viewing constraint is itself an editorial decision. It rules out the extremes and aims the edition squarely at the shared evening audience, which is a commercial choice as much as a cultural one, and it shapes what kind of stories the thirteen could be.

The genre mix works like a running order, balancing the light and the heavy for one broad audience.

Against a thin public purse

The scale matters because the alternative has been so modest. Namibia does maintain a public Film and Video Fund administered through its film commission, but it is small and stretched, and it has not on its own produced thirteen films in a single year. A private operator and the state broadcaster commissioning at this volume fill a gap the public purse could not close alone.

That is the quiet significance of the edition. It shows that the binding constraint on Namibian film has been commissioning money and distribution more than talent or ambition, given how many scripts answered a single call. Where the finance and the channels appear, the pipeline responds, and it responds quickly. A public fund that pays out slowly and in small amounts cannot generate this kind of volume, whereas a commercial commissioner with airtime to fill and an audience to hold has both the money and the reason to move at scale.

The bottleneck was never scripts or ambition; it was the money and the channels to make them.

What a pipeline needs after issue one

A single strong edition is a proof of concept; a pipeline is a habit. The open question the slate leaves is repeatability – whether a commission of this size becomes an annual fixture that production houses can plan around, or a one-off that leaves film-makers waiting for the next unpredictable call. Careers and companies are built on the first and not the second.

The measure a year on will be simple. If a second edition follows, the country has the beginnings of a standing film industry that production houses can plan careers around; if it does not, the thirteen films will have been a fine issue with no sequel, admired and not repeated, and the reserve of unmade scripts will go on waiting.

A slate becomes an industry only when the second edition follows the first on a schedule.

For a broadcaster, a funder or a policymaker reading Namibia’s creative economy, the thirteen-film slate is best understood as issue one of something that could recur. The decision it sets up is whether to commit to a regular commissioning cycle that a production sector can plan against, or to let a promising first edition stand alone. The scripts, it is now clear, are waiting.

Sources: The Namibian; Funding – Namibia Film Commission; Funding Criteria – Namibia Film Commission