Valerie Kabore of Media 2000, one of Burkina Faso’s biggest media players. Valerie Kabore of Media 2000 produces a number of TV projects, but also offers communication and audiovisual consulting.
Today we have a shoot, and soon we will move to another part of town. Now we have to get everything organised, do the actors’ make-up, rehearse, and then we can finally start filming,” says an enthusiastic Valerie, gearing up for the day’s filming.
Her company started by filming corporate DVDs before moving onto bigger industries like TV shows. Media 2000’s crown jewel, Ina, is screened in a number of countries around the world, and it took home six awards at the 2007 FESPACO film festival.
Today’s footage is being shot at a house in a residential area. This is an ordinary house, and we’ve got 26 different film locations in total for this series. This means that every time we shoot in a particular location, we need to rent that place. And if it’s not available, we cannot shoot. So we are in need of a big studio which we can use together with our other production houses based in Burkina and other African countries,” says Valerie.
Location is everything, so Valerie and her business contacts approached Holland’s PSI program to get funding for their studio facilities. The answer lay in the Dutch government, according to Jan-Arie Nugteren of PSI.“The PSI program wants to help joint ventures of companies from the Netherlands with companies in developing countries – new investments of innovative activities can ask for a subsidy with the Dutch government.”
To work around this, Valerie partnered with a production associate from Cameroon, who faces the same issues as her.
You saw this morning how much time we lost transporting everything from the office to the set. On one day we can now only shoot about five sequences. If we had a studio, we could just move from one set to another and work more efficiently. That’s why we are joining this investment project. It will benefit us and all the other TV producers in Africa,” Valerie says.
The studio will soon have a multi-dimensional usage plan, making it available for a number of other uses besides filming, such as music concerts.
It’s because of cooperative projects led by women like Valerie that Media 2000 has inspired others to stand up and prove that they have what it takes to power Africa’s media industry to new heights. Bravo, Valerie, bravo!
Valerie Kabore of Media 2000, one of Burkina Faso’s biggest media players. Valerie Kabore of Media 2000 produces a number of TV projects, but also offers communication and audiovisual consulting.
