Johannesburg (AFP)

"When I see my face and the movie poster on Netflix, I have to pinch myself to believe it," says Tendaiishe Chitima, lead actress of "Cook Off", a 100% Zimbabwean feature film available on Monday on the broadcast platform in line, after an epic shoot.

The young woman of 29, sparkling eyes and star smile, has still not been paid for her performance. Like no one else on the set, with an initial budget of only $ 8,000.

"It was not the kind of shooting where the actors had their caravan and wine galore. No, everything was minimalist. The first take or the second had to be the right one," she recalls from the property of his parents, settled in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Because in Zimbabwe, a country in southern Africa entangled in a bottomless economic crisis for two decades, shooting a fiction is a challenge and getting its broadcast on Netflix of the "miracle", as Tendaiishe Chitima explains to AFP.

In "Cook Off", a love story spiced with humor, the young Zimbabwean actress plays Anesu, a single mother, passionate about cooking but carried away by the whirlwind of everyday life. Unbeknownst to him, his son and grandmother put him on a culinary reality show.

To minimize the costs of the film, "Cook Off" was filmed as part of the local version of Top Chef, which was broadcast on the public channel ZBC.

"We used the costumes, the decor, the kitchen utensils" of the show, which was not renewed due to a lack of budget, remembers the screenwriter and director of the film, Tomas Brickhill. "Without that, there would have been no film."

The team also had to fight to simply have enough to pay for the team's food on the set.

Given the shortage of cash in Zimbabwe, "you could only withdraw 20 dollars a day. You had to find agents to buy cash from" on the black market, that is to say pay 110 dollars to get 100 in your pocket, remembers Tomas Brickhill.

"The kind of things we are used to in Zimbabwe but which, for foreigners, seems crazy," he noted during an interview with AFP.

- Teargas -

Another puzzle, the lack of running water at the location of the shoot. The "Cook Off" team had to go get it from a garden tap and boil it to avoid any illness.

The first days of filming were also severely disrupted by long unpredictable power cuts, the daily life of the people of Zimbabwe. We had to rent a generator, an impromptu expense for a film on a very low budget.

The shooting took place in 2017, in an economic, but also political, tense context, just a few months before the fall of President Robert Mugabe, in power since 1980.

One of the actresses was thus trapped in a demonstration repressed by the security forces with tear gas.

"She called to say that she could come to the set but that her eyes were constantly running and that she had no scene of crying to shoot," recalls, smiling today, Tomas Brickhill.

The team has overcome galley on galley, like the daily newspaper in Zimbabwe, but "Cook Off" remains a deliberately optimistic film.

"Usually, I played in TV series the roles of servants, prostitutes, women victims of trafficking of all kinds," explains Tendaiishe Chitima, who won with "Cook Off" his first role in a feature film.

"There I was able to play a woman who takes charge of her destiny and goes after her dream. The film shows the other side of our history (we Zimbabweans), we are resilient, we have dreams. "

In real life, Tendaiishe Chitima now imagines herself as an actress in big budget movies. For the moment, she is waiting for her stamp, three years after filming.

© 2020 AFP