By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 08
A commissioned film is a bundle of rights. Who holds them decides who earns from it long after it airs.
Behind the thirteen titles announced on 6 July 2022 sits a quieter question the announcement left unspoken: who owns them. A commissioned film is, in law, a stack of rights – the script, the performances, the music and the finished work – and the lasting value of a slate of thirteen Namibian films rests as much on who holds those rights as on who watches them.
The projects span comedy, family drama, action and romantic comedy, each a fifty-minute work built from an original script. Every one becomes a copyright asset the moment it is recorded, and the terms on which producer and commissioner divide that copyright will decide who earns from it in the years after the first broadcast.
A film is a stack of rights
Copyright in Namibia attaches to an original work as soon as it is fixed, without any registration step, so each finished film is protected from the day it exists. What that protection covers is layered: the screenplay is one right, the performances another, an original score a third, and the edited film a fourth that sits on top of them all.
This matters because a film can be sold, licensed or pledged only to the extent its rights are clear and held by someone able to grant them. A title with tangled or undocumented ownership is hard to trade even when audiences love it, which is why the paperwork behind a commission is not a formality.
The value in a film is the clarity of its rights, not only the quality of its story.
Commissioner or producer: who keeps the catalogue
The economic question a commission turns on is whether the platforms take the rights or the producers keep them. If MultiChoice and the broadcaster acquire the underlying copyright, the growing catalogue value accrues to the commissioners; if the production houses retain it and licence a broadcast window, the film-makers build assets they can exploit again elsewhere.
Neither arrangement is wrong, but they lead to different industries. A sector where producers keep their catalogues accumulates independent owners of tradable work; one where commissioners keep everything grows a supplier base paid once. The clause that sets this is invisible on screen and decisive off it.
The contract term nobody sees on screen decides whether producers own assets or merely deliver them.
'Authentic Namibian stories' as a brand asset
The phrase used to frame the slate, authentic Namibian stories, is more than sentiment; it is positioning. A recognisable national style, once established, becomes a brand a platform can market and defend, and the titles, logos and marks around a film franchise are registrable through the Business and Intellectual Property Authority alongside the copyright in the work itself.
Brand protection is where a one-off film becomes a repeatable property. A registered title and mark let a successful story return as a sequel or a series without a rival trading on its name, turning a single commission into a franchise that can carry advertising and merchandising later.
A protected title is what lets a popular film come back as a franchise rather than a memory.
Rights clarity comes before an industry
For the wider sector the lesson is sequencing. Namibian films struggle to reach buyers beyond a small home market, and a catalogue can only be licensed abroad, packaged for a streamer or offered as security for finance when its ownership is documented and enforceable. Formal, clear IP is the precondition for any of that, not a reward for it.
The thirteen-film commission is therefore also a test of rights hygiene. If the deals leave ownership legible and defensible, the slate seeds a tradable catalogue; if they leave it muddled, the films may screen well and still be worth little as assets.
A catalogue only travels or raises money once its ownership is written down and can be enforced.
For a producer, a screenwriter or a rights investor, the thirteen-film slate is where the real negotiation is not about the fee but about the copyright. The decision it forces on a Namibian film-maker is whether to bank the commissioning payment and surrender the work, or to hold the rights that let one film keep earning long after it leaves the screen.
Sources: The Namibian; Business and Intellectual Property Authority (BIPA); Sustainable Funding Models for the Namibian Film Industry (UNAM repository)
