‘Oman, a great filmmaking destination’

Mike Dearham is convinced Oman has the potential to metamorphose into a great filmmaking destination. It all depends on how you market it, feels the CEO of Film Resource Unit (FRU), South Africa. Dearham, indeed, knows better. For, he is entrusted with the hugely challenging task of selling South African films to the global audience. He heads FRU, a leading NGO tasked with the distribution of up to 400 social documentaries and feature films from the African continent. In a freewheeling interview with Mehre Alam, Dearham, who was on a visit to the Sultanate to attend the Muscat Film Festival, bared open his heart on a wide range of issues concerning the marketing of African films.

Oman’s Plusses
Oman, says Dearham, has unique advantages. This country, he points out, has good climate and fantastic locations. What it needs to develop is its service capacity in terms of production studios, editing studios, technicians’ skills and support. “I think the friendliness of the Omani people and the good security allows for a filmmaking destination. You need to sell it. This is a challenge.”

For Dearham, this is a sure way of economic empowerment as well as for dispelling the many a misconceptions surrounding the Arab world. “You can start using films to dispel the demonized concepts attached to the Arab people in the West, in particular,” he emphasizes. “This is critical if we’ve to improve public relations and engage this Arabophobia, this terrorist-behind-every-rock perception.”

Films As Trade Route
South Africa, informs Dearham, has co-production agreements with countries like Canada and Italy, and memoranda of understanding with countries like India and Netherlands. “Our governments sit down and identify the appropriate partners and say: well, we’re working in a few other fields and we’ve got historical links, now let’s collaborate in audio-visuals as well. This preferential collaboration between countries is necessary, especially in the light of the WTO laws that treat audio-visuals as an ordinary commodity.”

Dearham comes out with a formula: “As a developing country, you have to find ways to link up with other countries in bilateral arrangements and come to some agreement on different levels for preferential support, specifically on the audio-visual front.”

How soon does he expect the film industry to shape up in Oman? “Let’s not be be-little the challenge of developing a business. For Oman to rise to the challenge of becoming a film-producing nation, it has to ask itself what it can do to make it different from any other country in the world today. You need to find that uniqueness. Is it the stories? Is it the culture? Is it the locations? Is it the dovetailing between different government departments and the private sector that makes a filmmaker want to come here?

You can establish that, then package it and market it. There is no rocket science to this business. But to do that, you need to establish market intelligence. You need to know who is buying what.”

Develop The Domestic Market First
Dearham says his country is at a stage now where it is designing and even implementing strategies to take its films onto the global platform. “The first lesson Oman has to learn is that you must develop a domestic market. You cannot be thinking of international markets until you have ensured the successful promotion, marketing and delivery of your films at home. Secondly, the film in itself – as you see with Hollywood – is a powerful tool to sell the country, both in terms of the country as destination as well as in terms of product placement. Do you have any idea of how many businesses in Oman would like to have their products showcased in films?”

Filmmakers need to be thinking about product placements, and of course, getting the support from the private entrepreneurs, tips Dearham. “And of course, the Oman government – I was very pleased to see the Oman Culture Department supporting this film Al Boom – needs to nurture the domestic industry.

What does this mean? This means that the state needs to support and help the filmmaker effectively participate in the international markets. The Departments of Tourism, Culture, Education, Communication must integrate the strategies.
Each can have a strategy and a government mandate but the integration is a challenge. This is what we have been grappling with down South. How do we integrate the national department strategies?”

Different Marketing Strategy
How different the strategies are for marketing African films compared to, say, marketing Hollywood films? “We cannot compete with Hollywood films,” quips the medicine student-turned-soldier-turned-film-CEO. “They have budgets in excess of US$50 million for blockbuster films. There is no way any local or national cinema can compete with this kind of marketing phenomena. In the world today, Oman, South Africa, and the developing South are all sailing in the same boat. There is this huge juggernaut in front of us. How do we deliver our images to people so that our products become viable and we take our place in the world of entertainment and media?”

According to Dearham, the only way to do that is to keep the production cost low, and scout for segmented, niche ways of delivering image to people. “Segmentation of the market is critical for independent filmmakers today,” he says. “You cannot replicate what the monopolies, in this case Hollywood, and possibly even Bollywood, are doing. We do not have the critical mass. So we have to find ways of using new media, specifically Internet broadband delivery and digital hardware, in terms of production, to accomplish delivery of our stories.”

Broadband Formula
What about promoting African/Arab films via the internet broadband means? “It’s a new frontier,” Dearham spells out. “It’s a frontier that we have not charted yet. You need to firstly own the rights.
Filmmakers and legislators need to understand that you need to own the right -- the copyright for that particular media. Too often, our filmmakers are signing co-production deals and signing away broadband rights to financiers who may be giving more to the production budget than what they are. So, retain the right! That’s the first lesson.”

The second lesson, according to Dearham, is that in the delivery of those images, one needs to, just like in any other distribution pathway, sell one’s product. Which means one needs to understand whom one wishes to target. “Do you want to target educational institutions, universities, schools etc? Do you want to target cultural groups around the world? Do you want to target socio-political civil society groups? Is it the mass market in terms of retail outlets? Who do you wish to target?

“The filmmaker must, therefore, understand what his story is about and who is he is making it for. Once you understood this segmentation and your primary target audience, then you can sell it! You may create tools through trailers and innovative, creative designs, and then use the broadband medium to deliver it.”

What about the financial returns? “It is of course important. You need to have reliable credit card mechanism so that someone in China can click on a website, look at a film called Al Boom, a new Omani film, and wishes to view it on broadband. So he swipes a credit card and there is a return of that money too for the filmmaker.”

Cutting Edge Distribution
Dearham has developed and coordinated successful implementation of cutting edge distribution and marketing strategies for several South African films. What makes his strategies tick? “The philosophy around these strategies is born out of a conviction that in the world of business, whoever controls distribution, controls an industry. And whatever commodity you are dealing with: a soap or images or intellectual property, distribution is critical,” he asserts.

“We, in Africa, are production-led. We have been making films but we’ve not been thinking about the tail end of the equation, which is distribution. Therefore, I found it important to start looking at ways of delivering images to audiences – both existing and new. The existing audiences for the image was through the conventional mode of cinema, television, radio, DVD and even broadband (new media). And the new audiences were those who could not afford to view images in films; do not have television sets and cannot afford to buy things like DVDs etc.”

So, what is the answer? According to the veteran film-marketing strategist, the answer lies in fully equipped video vans, film clubs, and student movements around cinema. “And these delivery methods have to be backed, of course, by innovative marketing strategies.” This, indeed, has been Dearham’s humble contribution to the African cinema for the past few years.