By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14
The film is the visible product; the chain of adaptation rights behind it is the durable asset.
Hairareb looks like a new film and is really an old story wearing its third form. Before it was a feature, the tale was a novel by August C. Bikeur, and before that it lived as a Damara-Nama radio drama. Each of those changes is a rights transaction, and the value of the film rests on whether they were cleared and owned rather than merely borrowed.
That distinction decides whether a popular film is a business or a memory. As a production rooted in local culture and made for a paying audience, Hairareb is worth only as much of its story as its makers actually own and can defend.
A story that has already changed medium twice
The underlying work has travelled from broadcast performance to print to screen. Aina Kwedhi adapted Bikeur’s novel into the screenplay, in association with the Namibia Film Commission. Every step of that journey rests on the right to adapt the one before it, which is why the film’s security begins not with the camera but with the paperwork that grants each adaptation.
For any producer, this is the quiet foundation. A story cleared cleanly through each medium is an asset that can move again; one adapted on a handshake is a dispute waiting for the first sign of success.
The rights to adapt matter more than the footage they eventually produce.
The adaptation chain is the property
What a producer can most durably own here is not a single screening but the screenplay and the adaptation rights that sit beneath it. Made in association with the Namibia Film Commission, the film is a co-production whose value depends on those rights being written down and held, so the picture can be licensed to broadcasters or sold into other territories later.
This is the unglamorous work that separates a sellable title from a fondly remembered one. An owned and cleared adaptation is a licensable property; an uncleared one is a film that can screen but cannot safely be sold on.
Own the adaptation and you own something that can be sold long after the premiere.
The title and the mark
Beyond the story sits the name. A recognised film title is a trademark-grade asset, and Hairareb, drawn from one of the country’s oldest cultures, is a distinctive mark worth registering rather than leaving open. Namibia’s intellectual property machinery, administered by BIPA, is the apparatus for locking that value down before it becomes worth copying.
Handled with care, the brand compounds. A trusted title makes a sequel, a series or a re-release easier to place, because audiences, broadcasters and sponsors already know what the name promises them.
The film’s name is a mark worth owning long before it is a habit worth watching.
Doing the rights work up front
The strategic move is to treat the picture as intellectual property from the first day of pre-production: secure the adaptation chain, clear the music and performances, and register the title. Namibia has the institutions to support this through BIPA and the Film Commission; what a young industry usually lacks is the habit of using them before the content exists rather than after it has aired.
The risk is a beloved Namibian film that enriches the culture but not its makers, because ownership was never fixed while it still mattered. Fame without secured rights is a leak, not a legacy.
Clear the rights while filming, because retro-fitting ownership onto a hit is slow and costly.
For a producer, broadcaster or creative investor, Hairareb is a lesson in where the lasting value of a Namibian film actually sits: not in the screening but in the owned adaptation, the cleared rights and the registered title behind it. The decision is whether to do the rights work up front, so that a popular film becomes a property its makers can license and defend, rather than a story others can eventually take.
Sources: The Namibian; BIPA – Intellectual Property registration; Namibia Film Commission – Funding Criteria
