South Africa

Abstract

The involvement of women in the film industry in South Africa dates back to the apartheid era when several white women worked within what was then, as now, a white, male-dominated industry. In some instances, these women worked in professional partnerships with their husbands, such as producer-director Katinka Heyns who continues to work with her scriptwriter husband, Chris Barnard. While women screenwriters remain outnumbered by their male counterparts, a number of white women, especially those who write in English, are relatively well known, and still outnumber women of colour in the mainstream film industry, despite their minority status in terms of the country’s population demographics. This remains a legacy of the colonial and apartheid-era privileging of the minority white population in South Africa. Two significant findings have emerged from this research undertaken to map the presence of women screenwriters in the South African film industry: first, an awareness that, while a few women of colour have begun to enter the filmmaking sector, they remain at the margins of the mainstream film industry, writing primarily for documentaries and short films; and, secondly, the complete absence of black African women screenwriters. The reasons for this are unclear, and suggest that further research is warranted into the structural factors that continue to hamper the participation of women of colour, and black African women in particular, in the film industry in South Africa, other than as actresses.