Filmmaker Mmabatho Montsho Writes Open Letter To President Cyril Ramaphosa. Award winning film maker Mmabatho Montsho has written an open letter to the president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa.
Award winning film maker Mmabatho Montsho has written an open letter to the president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa. She spoke about the supposed disregard that the creatives in South Africa have been portrayed by the president not showing importance in the arts in his State of The Nation Address speech. The open letter occurred after President Cyril Ramaphosa gave a congratulatory to the filmmaker for her award at the 2020 Worldwide Women’s Film Festival.
She received the Best Short Film award for her movie ‘The Award Ceremony’. “South African creatives are relentlessly making their mark on the world stage and they continue to make us proud. Mmabatho Montsho’s short film, The Award Ceremony came back with a Best Short Film award at the 2020 Worlwide Women’s Film Festival. We celebrate this achievement,” says the President’s tweet. Mmabatho took the chance to speak about a lot of the problems that actors and actresses have had for quite some time.
“Upon seeing your tweet congratulating our film, The Award Ceremony for its international win for Best Short Film at The Worldwide Women’s Film Festival. I spoke with some of my colleagues so that the response is collective,” says Mmabatho Montsho. She went to state the problems that performers and directors have faced in the industry. She says women in the industry have no recourse in terms of the sexual harassment and exclusion. They have no platform to report gender based incidents such as exclusion, sexual harassment and intimidation.
She also put a bit of an accusation against DSTV channel, M-Net. The filmmaker says, “MNET continues exploit creatives off our intellectual property – our ideas – precisely what makes us storytellers and creatives. We are also aware of the disparity in production budgets between channels with black content (eg. Mzansi) and white content (eg. Kyknet).” M-Net says they note the need for equitable treatment in the value chain, and they would keep on going to make sure that the production houses they work with are up to the standards.
by Alexandra Ramaite
