By Denise Hattingh, Managing Director, KEU Underwriting Managers
In February, my phone didn’t stop. Brokers and industry stakeholders across the production ecosystem were reaching out within the same two-week window. Some wanted reassurance. Some wanted to vent. Most were just trying to figure out what to plan for, which is a reasonable thing to want when the ground feels like it’s shifting under you.
I’ve been in film and entertainment insurance for more than two decades now, long enough to have seen this industry go through several versions of itself. And I’ll be honest, what unsettled me most in those February conversations wasn’t the frustration people were expressing. It was the speed at which uncertainty was converting into inaction. Producers were already making decisions. Not waiting, not watching. Deciding.
That’s the thing most people outside the industry don’t fully appreciate. By the time uncertainty becomes visible in the headlines, the decisions have already been made quietly, in meetings and on calls, weeks earlier.
The recent discussions around incentive timelines and sector sustainability have been widely covered in the national media, reflecting the level of concern within the industry.
What Film Production Actually Moves
There’s a tendency to talk about film in terms of its cultural contribution, which is legitimate and important. But it sometimes obscures just how much physical, logistical and commercial activity a production actually generates.
A single international feature or large local series is, among other things, a transport operation, a construction project, a catering contract and an accounting exercise. It pulls in rigging crews and lighting specialists, legal and financial services, equipment rental businesses, security teams and medical standby providers. Through our broker network, we underwrite cover for many of these businesses, and we see the invoices, the claims patterns and the renewal conversations that follow.
These aren’t peripheral players benefiting at the edges of the industry. They are the industry, or a very substantial part of it.
When the pipeline slows, the effect isn’t gradual. It’s abrupt. Contractors stand down. Equipment goes into storage. Small businesses that run on tight margins and depend on production calendars being reasonably full start making their own quiet decisions about whether this is still a viable way to operate.
I’ve watched that happen. It’s not dramatic when it’s occurring. It just gets very quiet very quickly.
Why Stability Matters to an Underwriter
People sometimes ask me what insurance has to do with industry policy, and it’s a fair question. The short answer is that insurance functions best in predictable environments, and policy stability is a significant driver of predictability.
In production underwriting, the risks we manage are largely definable. Weather delays, equipment damage, non-appearance and liability exposures. We know how to price and structure cover around these things because they’re knowable. We have data, we have experience, and we have frameworks.
What we don’t have good tools for is macro-level uncertainty. When incentive frameworks shift without warning or funding timelines become unclear, the effect on investment decisions is real, and it happens upstream of anything we can see or respond to. By the time a production reaches the underwriting stage through a broker, the decision to proceed has already survived several earlier filters. Policy instability is one of those filters.
In conversations across the industry, we began hearing that projects developed specifically around South African locations and the incentive structure that made the numbers work were being reassessed once the incentive picture became uncertain. In some cases, discussions were already underway with international partners about alternative territories.
Those kinds of shifts rarely appear in official statistics. But they are felt quietly across the sector, and they compound over time.
South Africa’s Position Is Strong, But It Isn’t Guaranteed
We have real advantages, and I don’t want to understate them. Skilled crews, genuinely diverse locations, competitive exchange rates and solid technical infrastructure. These aren’t marketing claims. They’re the reasons South Africa has been a preferred destination for international production for as long as it has, and they represent years of accumulated investment and reputation-building.
But I’ve also watched other markets lose ground, and it rarely happens because of a single dramatic event. It happens because confidence erodes incrementally. A production goes elsewhere because the incentive answer took too long. Another goes because a colleague recommended a different territory based on a smoother experience. Word travels in this industry, in both directions, faster than most people realise.
Reputation gets you into the conversation. Certainty is what actually closes the deal.
I’m not trying to be alarmist here. I genuinely believe in this market. But I think the February conversations were a useful reminder that competitive position requires maintenance, not just defence. Other territories are actively and continuously working to attract the productions we want here. That work doesn’t pause because we’re having a difficult policy moment.
The Skills Question Keeps Me Up at Night
If I’m being direct about what concerns me most in all of this, it’s not the immediate economic impact. Economic activity can recover when conditions improve. Skills are a different matter.
South Africa has built a genuinely world-class crew base over the past twenty years. I’ve worked alongside these people in one capacity or another for most of my career. Directors of photography, production designers, first ADs, and technical specialists across every department who can hold their own on any international production.
That capability wasn’t handed to us. It was built slowly, through years of demanding work, knowledge transfer from international productions and the kind of practical experience you simply cannot shortcut.
When production volumes drop significantly and consistently, experienced people leave. They follow the work, which is entirely rational. And when conditions improve here, the assumption that they’ll return isn’t always correct. Lives have reorganised around new locations. New professional relationships have formed. Coming back requires disrupting all of that again.
From where I sit, this matters beyond the human dimension, which is already significant. Experienced crews reduce operational risk in ways that directly affect underwriting outcomes. They anticipate problems. They manage on-set situations without escalation. They bring a kind of institutional knowledge to a production that you cannot replicate by hiring people who are still developing.
Whether the industry retains that depth of talent through this period is genuinely uncertain. I hope it does. But hope isn’t a risk management strategy.
What Solidarity Actually Looks Like
I want to say something carefully here, because I think the word solidarity gets used loosely, and I’d rather be precise about what it means for us.
KEU is an underwriting business. We’re not lobbyists, we don’t set policy, and we don’t influence the decisions being debated at a government level. What we do have is twenty-plus years of relationships in this sector and a genuine stake in its health and continuity.
What solidarity looks like for us is less visible than a press statement. It’s being available when a broker calls at short notice because a production has hit an unexpected problem. It’s participating in industry forums and actually listening rather than arriving with a prepared position. It’s the ongoing work of refining our policy structures so that they reflect how productions actually operate rather than how we imagined they might operate when we last reviewed the wording.
It’s also being honest in conversations like this one, even when honesty means saying that things are more uncertain than we’d like them to be.
I’m not interested in overstating our role. But I do think specialist financial partners have an obligation to stay present and useful when the industry is navigating something difficult, rather than waiting for conditions to improve before re-engaging.
Where I Think This Goes
I don’t think February was a crisis. I think it was a stress test, and stress tests have value if the right people pay attention to what they reveal.
The conversations that were happening across the industry, uncomfortable as some of them were, reflected something real: a sector that cares about its own future and is prepared to say so loudly. Industries that have lost ground in other parts of the world often did so quietly, without anyone pushing back hard enough or early enough.
What happens next depends on whether the pressure those conversations generated translates into concrete action. Clearer timelines would help. More predictable frameworks would help. Better communication between government, industry bodies and the financial partners who need to plan around policy to do their jobs properly would help.
I’ve seen this industry come through difficult periods before. It has more resilience than it sometimes gets credit for. But resilience has limits, and the talent, the relationships and the competitive positioning that make South Africa genuinely attractive to international production are not infinitely renewable resources.
At KEU, we’ll keep doing what we do. Specialist cover, responsive underwriting and honest guidance through our broker partners. That doesn’t change regardless of what’s happening in the broader environment.
But I’d be doing a disservice to the relationships I’ve built over twenty years in this sector if I pretended the broader environment doesn’t matter. It does. Quite a lot, actually.
A stronger industry creates a stronger risk environment. Right now, it deserves serious attention from everyone involved.
