Media for Development Trust Film in Post-colonial Zimbabwe

From the Summary

The report looks at the role of feminism in development by looking at the film "Neria" and another Zimbabwean film "Flames". Neria a courtroom drama from Zimbabwe, explores the emergence of a women's rights movement. The film also looks at the uneasy relationship between modern-minded city-dwellers and their counterparts in the villages.

Moving outwards from feminism to regimes of representation generally, then goes on to consider the "problemisation" of Africa in both of these films, and Everyone's Child (1996) one of the projects produced by the Media for Development Trust that now distributes all three films. It looks into how these films represent the capitalisation of the post-colony by the developing powers.

Major findings are:

• The report shows how the West's continuing tendency to reconfigure and dominate the Third World is manifest in the style of post-colonial cinema, and its substantial similarity to colonialist propaganda;
• how hegemonic Western ideologies such as feminism can appropriate and redefine Third World history according to their own agendas;
• and how development cinema imposes a scopic order on the Third World, constructing it as a problem to be solved, and covertly suggesting that the responsibility for the problem lies in the failings of Third World masculinity.

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