By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14

An initiative is only as real as the person who convenes it and the makers who fill it.

A film initiative is only as real as the person who convenes it and the people who supply the work that gives it substance. Namibia’s lockdown cinema had both: an operator who built the shared space, and a set of filmmakers whose finished work made the space worth visiting.

The convenor was Tim Huebschle of Collective Productions, whose stated aim was to provide a platform for all local film-makers to share their content in one place. It is an organiser’s job rather than an author’s – build the room, then let others fill it with their films.

The convenor

Huebschle is a settled operator rather than a newcomer. He co-founded the content hub collective.com.na in 2009 and has spent the years since producing Namibian stories aimed at audiences beyond the country, work that made him a natural person to organise a shared platform when venues closed. His own 2019 feature, Land of the Brave, is evidence of a maker who also builds structures around making.

That dual habit matters here. Convening a common space for rival filmmakers asks for someone trusted to run the room without competing for its spotlight, and an established producer with his own credits is better placed to do that than a first-timer would be.

The convenor’s value was not another film but a place other people’s films could gather.

The makers who filled it

The catalogue came from filmmakers with real bodies of work, not hopefuls. Oshoveli Shipoh contributed the horror short Resentment; Joel Haikali added Differences; Neige Moongo brought the experimental animation The Unseen; Leon Mubiana offered Intruder; and Dark Crown Productions supplied the first season of its web series Untitled. Each arrived with a finished film, which is what turned an idea into a schedule.

Their willingness to post is the initiative’s proof of concept. A shared platform only works if makers trust it enough to place their own work inside it, and this group did.

The convenor built the room; these makers are the reason anyone had a reason to enter it.

Operators with track records

Several of the contributors bring records that pre-date the lockdown by years. Haikali’s 2011 feature My Father’s Son became the first Namibian film to secure a distribution deal, and his short Differences won the Namibian audience choice award in 2008; he runs his own house, Joe Vision Production. Shipoh, for his part, has written, directed and self-funded a run of short films rather than waiting for commissions.

These are not resumes assembled for a press release; they are evidence that the initiative gathered working operators. A platform stocked with proven makers has a far stronger claim on an audience than one built on promise alone.

The catalogue’s credibility rests on makers who were operating long before the lockdown gave them a hub.

The artists behind the credits

The initiative also put the people, not just the films, on view. Rodelio Lewis, an actor in the Untitled series, spoke plainly about the financial hardship facing artists during the lockdown, a reminder that behind each contributed title sits a working creative whose income had just been interrupted. The convening was, in part, mutual support among operators under strain.

That honesty sizes the story correctly. These are ordinary working artists pooling their films because the usual routes to an audience had closed, and the initiative is best read as operators helping one another stay visible rather than as a triumphant launch.

The films were the product; the people who made them were working artists suddenly without a stage.

For anyone backing Namibian screen work, the lockdown-cinema team shows the two roles a local film scene needs: a trusted convenor willing to build shared infrastructure, and established makers willing to fill it. The decision it models for a funder or a partner is whether to support the quiet operators who assemble a platform and stock it with real work, rather than waiting for a single marquee production to carry the sector on its own.

Sources: The Namibian; Tim Huebschle (FilmFreeway); Joel Haikali (Wikipedia)