South Africa's Film history truly began when the first ever newsreels were captured during the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) by the British Warwickshire Company.
The Kimberly Diamond Robbery (1910) was accredited as South Africa's first feature film, however the film industry didn't properly take off until 1913, when US immigrant, IW Schlesinger, took control of national production, distribution and exhibition. The period between 1916 and 1922 saw the production of 43 high-quality, feature films. Schlesinger's epics commonly depicted Boers and Britons standing unified against black hordes in films such as De Voortrekkers (1916).
Schlesinger retained ownership of the industry until 1956 when 20th Century Fox bought out his holdings. Fox sold ownership to Ster Films in 1969, who controlled the local film arena until the mid-1990s when the industry changed hands again, bought by Primedia. The year 2000 witnessed the collapse of Primedia's ownership, introducing the IDC (Industrial Development Corporation), a government-funding organisation, as the country's biggest investor.
A 30-year lull in production was broken with a spark ignited by Jamie Uys in the 1950's. He attracted Afrikaans investors, arranged government subsidies for films using indigenous languages and created a platform for young Afrikaans filmmakers to emerge. Uys is well-known for making fun of inter-ethnic rivalries, however one of his most poignant films was Dingaka (1965), offered a sympathetic examination of the conflict between Roman-Dutch and African Customary Law.
Uys' themes are echoed in the modern era by Leon Shuster who examines racial conflicts and rapidly shifting political climates in his many tongue-in-cheek comedies such as, A Zulu on My Stoep (1993) and Panic Mechanic (1997). Some other notable films that question apartheid, are Jans Rautenbach's expressionist film, Jannie Totsiens (1970) and Athol Fugard's Neorealist feature Boesman and Lena (1973), which exposed a small percentage of the local population to new critical styles
The first black-directed feature was Gibson Kente's How Long (must we suffer...?) (1976), shot in the Eastern Cape during the Soweto uprising. From the late 1980s the South African film industry shifted, exhibiting a new, critical and more sophisticated side through anti-apartheid films. A the remake of Cry the Beloved Country (1996), produced in this era by Anant Singh, was a groundbreaking move, which laid the basis for the indigenised cinema soon to come. Multi-racial teams have since made successful films, such as Ramadan Suleman's Fools (1997).
What characterises South Africa's post-apartheid film industry is an ever-evolving hub of socially aware filmmaking. Oscar nominations for Katinka Heyns's Paljas (1998), Darrell Roodt's Yesterday (2005) and Gavin Hood's Oscar winning Tsotsi (2006) emphasises the evolution of the local film industry. There is a move from solely politically-motivated filmmaking to films which reflect the everyday ordinariness of being a South African. Clearly, the pendulum of the South African Film Industry is on the upswing.