THE road to success for local film and theatre director Patience Gamuchirai Tawengwa was not that rosy.
BY WINSTONE ANTONIO
She had to defy all the odds before she could taste success. Today, she stands tall on the local showbiz scene.
At one time, she was “forced” to shelf her dream of pursuing arts and fly to the United States of America to study business management abandoning the arts she loved most.
Her late father, former Harare mayor, Solomon Tawengwa, wanted her to pursue business studies.
While at university in the US, Tawengwa would occasionally attend arts workshops and briefly turned to writing, contributing articles to a college magazine.
After completing her business studies, Tawengwa worked for a number of companies in the US.
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When her sister talked to her about film-making courses in South Africa, Tawengwa decided to try her hand in the film industry.
In 2006, she went to South Africa to study film-making. She came back home in 2007 and started working on local projects with her first involvement in local film industry being when she directed a short film titled The Return.
Tawengwa recently moved a step further in her career launching a production house called Milele Africa which she said seeks to have a transformative impact on the lives of young artistes by helping them tell globally appealing universal stories from a local perspective.
“I am delighted to have unveiled Milele – Milele, [a Swahili word which means forever] and it is my hope that the channel is going to be an agent of building something which will forever tell our stories and last through the ages from generation-to-generation,” Tawengwa said.
She said she was sure that by 2021, Milele would be a fully self-sustaining and profitable organisation through the sales and distribution of television and film content.
She said working in the local arts industry was “a labour of love” as the sector had little monetary rewards.
“I have worked in the Zimbabwean arts industry for almost 10 years now and in that time I know that my one hope and aspiration has been to come to a place where I can consistently earn a living and experience the dignity of paid employment through my creative work,” she said.
Tawengwa said artistes must not desire to be given money or hand outs, but to be able to earn cash through their own efforts which will then allow them to experience dignity.
“In this age in which we are living, I do not think we can keep on thinking about our creative talent as something which should be fully reliant on donations, but as something which we treat as a business,” Tawengwa said.
“The global film industries we greatly admire started off somewhere and we have to actively make strides towards building our own.”
Tawengwa said her organisation’s first project will be called Somewhere in Africa and it will feature veteran actress Sandra Chidawanyika-Goliath as a female president.
