By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 03

A Namibian feature turns a story of love and drought into an evening at the cinema that feels like home.

For a few evenings in September, the Ster-Kinekor screen at Windhoek’s Grove Mall offered Namibians a rare pleasure: a feature about their own people, in their own settings, told through one of the country’s oldest cultures. Hairareb, a story of love during a devastating drought, made a night at the cinema feel like a night at home.

The pleasure of seeing our own

The appeal is easy to underrate. Watching David Ndjavera, Claudine de Groot and Hazel Hinda carry a story rooted in Damara-Nama life, filmed in the dry terrain around Otjimbingwe, gives an audience something an imported film never can: recognition. These are familiar faces and familiar country, and seeing them on a cinema screen is a different pleasure from watching a distant star.

The subject deepens it. A tale of love and materialism during drought speaks directly to a nation that knows dry years intimately, so the film reads less as spectacle than as a mirror held up to shared experience.

It also does quiet work for the culture itself. Putting a Damara-Nama story on the big screen tells audiences that their language and history are worth the price of a ticket and the effort of a production, which is its own small act of respect.

A local story, given the big screen, becomes a shared evening rather than a private memory.

For cinemas and the leisure trades around them, the lesson is that home-grown stories can fill an evening as surely as imported ones. The move is to give local voices and local scenery room on the screen, and let recognition do what spectacle alone cannot.

Sources: The Namibian; Hairareb (Wikipedia); Namibia Film Commission – About