A lifetime dreaming of your story. Years researching, raising funds. Months pouring over text and proposals, rejections and victories. Eventually production starts and stops. Subjects’ lives change and alter the narrative possibilities. That’s ok though, it’s part of the thrill. Budgets get higher, funding runs lower; but you manage, somehow. Finally, you feel you’re ready for the edit, you think you’re ready. Then the real problems begin.

Rough Cut Lab Africa – RCLA supports documentary films in the late offline stage by pairing up directors and editors on their projects with African story consultants from all fields in the filmmaking world, including editors, directors, producers, programmers, academics, curators and critics. In partnership with the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), the South African Guild of Editors, Encounters South African International Documentary Festival and the Refinery, we invite nine African documentary film projects to spend three days over two weeks working on their films, with successful candidates receiving targeted finishing support from the Refinery when they eventually lock story.

RCLA is an virtual programme held annually. This Call is only open to African documentary projects with a working rough cut. Up to 70% of the rough cut must be completed prior to the lab. If a project has been chosen the previous year, they are unfortunately not eligible to enter RCLA with a new project in the following year.

Submission criteria:

• One-page synopsis.

• Director and editor’s biography.

• Online screener link and password to the viewable rough cut

• One page each from the director and editor outlining the difficulties currently experienced with the film’s current structure and / or problematic areas in the story. Please include what has been achieved up to this point.

• Films need to be independent and feature length - 70 mins or above.

• Please indicate software used.

 

 

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Photo cred: newnoise.co.za

 

London born Libyan-Capetonian, Khalid is a documentary director, producer and editor with a film-

making practice spanning over more than 25 years. Having studied film language in London Khalid

worked in the film industries of the UK, Middle East and Southern Africa and now runs his production

company tubafilms from South Africa and is based in Maputo, Mozambique. Khalid works and

researches as a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the

Western Cape.

 

Khalid is founder and director of Rough Cut Lab Africa RCLA, a support programme for African

documentaries at the rough cut stage in association with SAGE and Encounters South African International Documentary film festival.

 

Khalid’s practice is strongly dedicated to the pedagogy of independent filmmaking and story

construction in Africa, teaching and consulting in and outside film institutions and organized

frameworks. He describes his practice in his own words as moving at vastly different paces: while his

own films have taken up to seven years to finish, he constructs and completes numerous films every

year as an editor, turning his practice into a “strange place of directing directors, guiding first time

filmmakers, imbibing worlds alien to [his] own, containing and creating another’s vision, manifesting the

dreams of the subjects in the films and being taken by the voice of the material itself”.