“People are looking for things that are easy and foreign. We use foreign models that militate against our very efforts to shape our ailing film industry. We have not come to a point where we can produce indigenous stories that are uniquely South African. Our narrative is primarily dictated by foreign story-telling models." Seipati Bulane Hopa, producer and director (Molo Fish): November 2002.
"The lion's share of monies earned from local cinema releases and television deals leave our shores and are paid over to large Hollywood studios ..we want to change this”¦ and introduce films that challenge afro pessimism." Dianne Magagane, FRU Communications Officer.
David Wicht, Producer and Owner of Film Afrika, the company which made Mandela and de Klerk, as well as Promised Land.
“ [We need] to come up with films that the public will pay good money to see. We need to build up confidence not only with investors, but with the cinema going public as well. Mostly they stay away to avoid the ‘cringe factor.’ Foreign buyers just roll their eyes at the memory of the box office death of the worthy but dreary anti-apartheid films that have been made about us (albeit by foreign filmakers.) We need to grasp the fact that we're in the entertainment business, not sociology, and that film is an expensive medium that cannot serve the whims of a minority audience."