TOMAS FILMS
Reconstructing South African history… and contributing to the renaissance of African culture
TOMAS FILMS
Welcome to Tomas Films, a Film Production Company dedicated to reviving and sharing African social and cultural history by producing work that focusses on the neglected aspects and thereby creating awareness and appreciation of its transverse, positive and uplifting elements.
ABOUT US
Tomas Films was founded in 1993 by producer–director Bridget Thompson to preserve on film and disseminate South African and Africa-wide oral culture, which could have otherwise been lost for future generations.
Since 1998, highly regarded Somali filmmaker Abdulcadir Ahmed Said has been a co-director or director on Tomas Films products.
OUR WORK:
To tell entertaining stories of courage, wit and wisdom which are imbued with the aesthetics of South Africa’s dynamic music, art and storytelling. We try to get beneath the skin of South African society, exploring its pain and brutal past towards healing.
VISION:
Our productions focus on neglected voices, helping to create appreciation of South Africa's transversally connected, positive and uplifting elements. Having focused primarily on documentary film. We are now also producing fiction FEATURE FILMS.
MISSION:
Long term we intend to produce Drama Series on South African History aiming to revive awareness of Southern African social and cultural history.
REACH:
Tomas Films collaborates with writers, musicians, artists, young filmmakers in South Africa, across the continent and internationally and has contributed to key film training initiatives locally and internationally
Our work has reached local and international television, film festivals and educational forums, been translated into a number of languages and been screened on all continents and at major national and international events. Our films have been screened in museums, galleries, at state events as well as in townships around South Africa. Films made more than 20 years ago are still reaching new audiences. Most recently a ground-breaking video art produced by Tomas Films was acquired by the Constitutional Court Art Collection.
Meet the Team
Producer/Director
Bridget Thompson
Bridget Thompson is a prizewinning filmmaker whose work has travelled the globe and been translated into many languages. In 2023 in an effort to bring more heart to SA feature films, she initiated a script training workshop, Scriptlab, Going beyond Guns, Gangs and Action, which produced 8 feature film scripts with female protagonists .
She has conceived and run four national multi-year art/film education projects which reached community based organisations, artists, filmmakers and teachers in peri-urban and rural areas in all provinces including a unique film based webinar series during COVID.
As producer of her own films and manager of national education projects she is accustomed to managing multi-million-rand budgets, achieving maximum results from the funds and providing extensive empowerment and outreach from Thohoyandou to Cape Town and from Upington to rural E Cape reaching 1000s.
Bridget has devised a scriptwriting workshop which encourages the visceral expression of the writer’s own experience. She has run this workshop in Cape Town amongst disabled groups, blind people, youth suffering with HIV and aids and bipolar as well as refugee groups. Also in Colombia for a group called Ojo al Sancocho, a youth led filmmaking group operating in the barrio (township) of Bogota using film to encourage social cohesion between negros (Afrocolombians) and indigos (native Colombians) displaced by the violence in Colombia. Riveting stories emerged. She has run the same workshop successfully amongst master’s film students in Iran and as an adjunct to the Durban film festival in Kwamashu. As an invited guest lecturer she taught film production and film language at the EBCCI (Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination) at the University of the West Indies Barbados campus in 2009 and was a guest lecturer at AFDA film school in Cape Town on a number of occasions in the early 2000’s. She was a member of the international scientific committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project: Resistance, Heritage Liberty from 2011-2017 where she advised on film projects and has served on a number of international film festival juries.
Producer/Director
Abdulcadir Ahmed Said
Abdulcadir Said is a renowned Director of Photography, sound designer and a prize winning film-maker from Mogadishu, Somalia who has been in exile for more than a decade. He learned his craft in Moscow and Italy and through 'guerilla' film-making in Somalia. He has produced, written, directed and assistant-directed many films. He has two feature films on Somalia in development and is the founding director of the African Cinema Centre - a project set up to share knowledge and skills with a new generation of film-makers. He has won numerous international prizes for his films including the following: EEC Prize, OAU prize, London film festival prize, Best Film Mogpafis film festival, Best Film Oberhausen film Festival, Montreal, Torino Film Festival, Amiens Film Festival, Tokyo film festival, Delhi film festival, Milan African Film Festival, African Union Film Festival.
Now an SA citizen he wrote the course and manual and ran the CREATIVE PROCESS FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN which has been delivered in 4 provinces in SA In 2015 and 2017 he was the lead mentor of young filmmakers on the Youth filmmakers project of Natives at Large In Johannesburg He also mentored young film makers on SABC’S Dramatic Encounters in 1999. He was invited guest lecturer in cinema two years running ( 2008-2009) at the Barbados Campus of the University of the West Indies and also at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2013 where he was a script mentor.