Zimbabwean Film at Cinémathèque Suisse

Zimbabwe's groundbreaking short musical KARE KARE ZVAKO (Mother's Day) is to be preserved for history in one of the world's top film archives.

KARE KARE ZVAKO - MOTHER'S DAY won a host of accolades including the Best Short Film at the Zimbabwe International Film Festival Trust and at the Milan African Film Festival, the Golden Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival after its release in 2004, when it also made the finals in the Sundance Film Festival shorts competition. Based on an old Zimbabwean folk tale, the Nyerai Film's production brings together a unique combination of traditional Zimbabwean storytelling, theatre and dance as well as satirical horror to the big screen.

“My aim was to tell authentically Zimbabwean stories on the screen in a way that reaches wide audiences," said KARE KARE ZVAKO director Tsitsi Dangarembga. Dangarembga founded Nyerai Films in 1992 to elevate Africa’s presence in the global film industry. She went on to found ICAPA Trust in 2009 to further this work.

Together with Zimbabwean co-producer Pangolin Films, Nyerai Films financed the project through a grant from the European Union's Africa-Caribbean-Pacific programme. “Folktales are always understood globally regardless of which culture they come from. So I looked to popular Zimbabwean folk tales. I leveraged song and dance since singing is a part of telling folk tales in my culture. Dance automatically follows music. Together music and dance make a film acoustically and visually interesting,” Dangarembga explained.

On the technical side, Swiss expertise made a significant contribution to the film's success. Director of Photography, Professor Pierre Mennel, now a lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts, used an Ikegami video camera to give the half hour short its unique look. In an interview Mennel said the production team relied heavily on reflectors to control the lighting to create a pre-technology ancient setting, while also maintaining the texture and tones of highly melanated skin tones. "The process required a deep understanding of the cultural context, the visual style, and the technical side of filmmaking” he added, commenting that films shot in this way exist, but rarely feature people of color.

Shot on tape, Mennel oversaw a blowup to 35mm celluloid in process which made use of a Swiss technology that was state of the art two decades ago. Presenting the film on celluloid increased the film's aesthetic and production value, enabling the Zimbabwean tale to be selected for prestigious festivals worldwide. The production initially tried to co-produce with Switzerland, "but there was a lack of understanding on the concept of African fairy tales as there was a stereotype that these tales were 'wild' which made it challenging to convey the depth and beauty of the stories they wanted to tell," Mennel observed.

Now, the 35mm print and the sound negative of this Zimbabwean tale are to be preserved for posterity in the Federal Swiss Film Archive located at the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne. The Cinémathèque will also convert the existing print to a high quality 4k print with Dolby Digital sound, ensuring its safekeeping for future generations of cinema lovers. Established in 1948 to preserve Swiss and international film heritage, the Cinémathèque Suisse is recognised by the International Association of film archives (FIAF) as one of the industry's most important film archiving institutions. The size, diversity and quality of its collection is amongst the best in the world.

“Seeing KARE KARE ZVAKO archived in a prestigious institution like the Cinémathèque Suisse is a way of ensuring that the cultural richness and diversity of African filmmaking are recognized and preserved,” Mennel said.