In a country that has been dwarfed by war, where there is not a single cinema nor a film industry, the Juba Film Festival began. In the world’s youngest nation, South Sudan’s first ever festival of its kind was held in the capital city, Juba, where local filmmakers armed with cameras, mics, and umbrellas are working to create one.
“Nobody, war or evil will stop us from enjoying our stories through the power of film. South Sudan has been like a battlefield, but we gained independence and there is a great need to share our own stories,” says the festival’s founder, Simon Bingo, an orphaned refugee turned local TV personality.
The festival was a dream made possible by a grant through Internews and USAID. The hope is that it will kick-start a film industry in South Sudan. With support from donor agencies including the local German embassy, and the guidance of professional mentors from New York’s Barefoot Workshops and guerrilla filmmakers What Took You So Long. Bingo describes the project as a pop-up film school for young South Sudanese filmmakers. “There’s no infrastructure to learn about film here,” he explains. ”The festival is more than about showing movies; the goal is to build capacity to make movies.”
Pitching sessions and workshops were conducted with four outside mentors where four scripts were chosen from South Sudanese stories that were then made and edited and screened at the film festival. The Juba Film Festival culminated with screenings of these four movies and selected submissions on 7 July 2016, two days before the fifth anniversary of South Sudan’s independence. 40 films had been submitted for the festival. 30 were selected for screening during the festival which was held from 4 to 7 July 2016. 11 films were selected to compete for prizes.
“We have a diverse country with a lot of stories, it is important to find a platform to tell them,” says Bingo. He first fell in love with movies as a teenager, watching outdoor screenings in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya. He picked up camera skills after a stint with the NGO FilmAid and later won a scholarship to pursue a film degree in Nairobi. When he graduated in 2009, he moved back to Juba, just as his homeland was pushing for independence from Sudan. He found a job at the South Sudan TV network as a video editor, and later developed the Bingo Show, a weekly programme airing music videos.
“The film festival was very well received,” says Bingo. He describes the 900 seat theatre, the flagship venue used for the screenings, as being full for three days. As were the other venues, namely the French Institute open space, Youth Sports Centre and Juba Tukul. “Individual awards like best director, editor, camera, actress or actor and script etc. and cash prize for the best fiction and best documentary,” explains Bingo. “We also received ten international films produced about South Sudan.” Bingo describes the first of what he plans to make an annual festival as a creative, peaceful revolt, to diversify the pervasive stereotypes about the new nation in the foreign press.
By Cera-Jane Catton
