Piracy and counterfeiting is the name
of the game on mainland Africa, and you can thank our friends the
Chinese. There's a lot there that I could go in to, but maybe that
will be another time. Today, we're talking about a line of work that
puts food on the table for hundreds of people in Nampula: Movie
salesman.
There is not a single movie store in
all of Nampula. That's not to say movies don't exist, or that there
aren't hundreds of movie salesmen. The movies exist as the copy
somebody took off their video camera while watching the actual movie
in a theater somewhere in Russia or China with Russian or Chinese
subtitles that are sometimes obscured behind the head of the person
that sat in front of the video camera.
These pirated copies are then put into
mass production, smuggled into container ships and sent across the
world. Then certain enterprising young individuals take these copies
and wander the streets selling movies at a tidy little profit. The
speed at with which new titles can enter the market is alarming.
Folks here were selling copies of the latest James Bond outing before
it had even come to theaters in the U.S.
Most of the titles are either
blockbusters or absolute crap. There is just no middle ground. The
ones that are blockbusters look like somebody filmed the movie
from inside a movie theater, took it home, put it in their VCR,
pressed play, filmed that, and then sent it to Africa. The
ones that are crap titles are copies of movies that went straight to
DVD (Universal Soldier 6, Behind Enemy Line 4, MegaPiranha vs
Sharktopus 3), and often with a new title that is often more of a
description of the picture on the cover. The Avengers was being sold
as "Super Team USA Hero". Anything with a picture of a
soldier on the front is titled with a combination of the words US,
soldier, hero, fighter, commando, super, army, super-army, delta, and
operation. It's a little like mad-libs.
And the movies are such bad quality
they often put four or five (or ten) on a single disc and sell it as
a package deal. They might include all Steven Seagal action flicks,
all Chuck Norris action flicks, Sharktopus vs MegaPiranha I, II, III,
and IV, or similarly themed groupings.
One I saw the other day definitely
caught my eye (and not only because the salesman literally shoved it
inches from my face. This one was a religious themed disc, and he was
trying to sell it to me because I am white (therefore a missionary)
and all the films were dubbed in Portuguese.
The dvd case had, in the upper left
corner, a picture of Ben Kingsley starring as what could have been
either Abraham or Moses and was titled Abraham and Moses. Not
separately, it was as if Abraham and Moses were starring together in
a buddy cop film trying to solve a string of camel thefts.
In the other corner was another picture
of Ben Kingsley taken from what I assumed to be the same movie, just
a different outfit and different desert panorama, and was titled
Abraham and Moses 2. The third movie in the bottom left
corner was a stereotypically Aryan looking Jesus and thus the movie
was appropriately titled Jesus.
What really threw me for a loop was the
fourth movie plastered in the lower right corner. It was a poster for
the movie 300 with the overlaid text of "Gideon and his
300". The person who made the cover obviously knew enough of his
Bible to know who Gideon was, but had neither to time to actually
read the story in Judges 7 nor watch the movie. You, at home right
now reading this, here is a caution to you: Do not watch the movie
300. It is in no way about
Gideon (unless the Bible was WAY wrong AND Gideon ran around in a
loin cloth whoring it up in ancient Greece in between bouts of
killing absolutely everybody that was not a whore).
I asked the guy if
he had seen any of these movies he was trying to sell to me. He
muttered in English, "Yes, yes. Good movie. Good movie. Movie of
Jesus, yes?" I asked him if he had seen "Gideon". A
snicker curled at edge of his mouth and he just repeated his mantra,
"Oh, yes yes. Good movie. Very good movie."
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