Johannesburg- The new model for success in the media world is partnerships and collaboration, panellists from India and South Africa concurred at the Indian Film Festival South Africa 2025 (IFFSA) here on Saturday evening.
They were speaking as part of a number of IFFSA events organised by the Indian High Commission, the Consulate in Johannesburg and Zee Entertainment Africa over the past three days.
“The new model for success in the media world is partnerships and collaboration. We have got beyond the stage where one entity could do everything. Today you need to collaborate because technology and content demands this,” said Ashok Namboodiri, CBO, Zee International Business at the Indian media giant.
“India’s media entertainment industry is growing at ten per cent of which visual effects (VFX) are expected to reach about USD 2 million by 2026. Post-production is therefore a clear area for collaboration. Some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters have VFX and special effects done by India, so that would be an area for collaboration,” Namboodiri said.
He was hopeful that a film treaty expected to be signed between India and South Africa later this year would open doors “for massive collaboration of this kind”.
Agreeing with Namboodiri, Farhad Omar, founder of South African media production house Media Valley, said no one company or country could produce the best quality product without collaboration.
He said India has taken the lead when it comes to VFX productions.
“VFX has brought about a big change in the media landscape recently, where we are able to capture finer pixels in camera. We have all seen virtual production spaces in India and if we look further into that, extended reality productions which have come about. We at Big Valley have pioneered that within the South African space,” Omar said.
“We are looking at that learning and skills development that we could take from India. India’s budgets and content consumption of soapies and films is amazing, so we are looking forward to that skills transfer between ourselves so that we could see South Africa becoming another destination with India for us to collaborate,” Omar said.
Omar said the African continent was a “treasure trove” of stories that it wanted to share with the world in collaboration with India by making South Africa an additional hub for this.
A leading content supplier in South Africa, Irfaan Bux said that in Europe it was far cheaper to produce animation than live action, while the opposite was true in India and South Africa.
“India and South Africa have the same issue of live action, which is so much cheaper, because we have so much of cheap talent available to us. So, it’s very hard for us to produce cheap animation, but the Europeans have caught onto the cheap labour and the ability and the utilisation of the CGI capabilities of India and have started making amazing animation content in India,” Bux said.
Bux expressed confidence that with collaboration between India and what Media Valley was pioneering, there could be a lot more animation produced in South Africa.
Actor trainer Rajesh Gopie said that India was a powerhouse in cinema after IT, the country’s biggest industry.
Gopie commented on the change in Indian cinema after spending some time training actors in Mumbai.
“There is a shift in movie making from the big Bollywood-type feature films to more realistic-based acting, which is more in line with South African acting. But when it come to the unequal size of India versus South Africa, we must always remember that although we are a smaller country, we make amazing films and have directors and we can do it. India can give us a big hand,” Gopie said.
Gopie also wanted to see more African stories in India. “I would like to see a cross-pollination of stories, because Indians are interested in the world,” he said.
Namboodiri shared Gopie’s principle of cross-pollination, saying that Zee TV has in the past six years or so done co-productions in various languages across the globe, including Arabic and Spanish, as well as dubbing into many languages in almost all continents.
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