‘Keiskamma (A story of love)’ wins Ousmane Sembène Award

GTZ’s AIDS sector project and the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) have recently presented the Ousmane-Sembène Films-for-Development Award for the second time. This year it went to the South African Miki Redelinghuys for her film ‘Keiskamma/A story of love’. The jury explained its decision by stating, ‘This film deeply moved and impressed us.…It presents a very poignant portrayal of the challenges that HIV and AIDS represent for a rural community’.  This award is given to films that deal specifically with development cooperation issues. In all some 17 African films on HIV/AIDS, gender, education and poverty were nominated for the USD$5,000 prize.

‘I am very pleased by the jury’s decision’, said Thomas Kirsch, Manager of the AIDS sector project. ‘In her film, Miki Redelinghuys does not just look at the importance of personal contact and care for those affected [by the disease]. The fact that this immune deficiency disease has driven an entire village to the verge of disappearing and that people only have a renewed sense of hope for themselves and their relatives if they have access to medicine demonstrates the importance of comprehensive medical care in the fight against this pandemic and its social ramifications.’

As a side-event to the festival, the sector project put on a workshop that gave approximately 20 film-makers from Tanzania and other African countries the chance to hone their film-making skills against a development-policy backdrop. Here they learned, for example, how to budget for a film and how to sensitize others to HIV and AIDS, but they also derived more from this event. ‘The workshop presented these talented young film-makers with an ideal networking forum because, a lot of development policy film makers are still cut off from the rest,’ explained Thorsten Wassermeyer, who established the GTZ film award last year together with the AIDS sector project. The brochure published recently by KfW und Inwent, ‘TV soap operas in HIV education: Reaching out with popular entertainment’, also generated considerable interest.

From 10 to 13 September 2009, the film museum in Potsdam is showing eight selected ZIFF films. ‘Keiskamma/A story of love’ is to be shown in connection with a podium discussion on 12 September on the theme of development films.