Shareholders in Anant Singh’s Cape Town Film Studios (the old Dreamworld project) on Tuesday confirmed they had finalised agreements and contracts to conclude the R430m project.
The shareholder agreement was signed between Singh’s Videovision, HCI’s Sabido Investments, the Rico trust, the Helderberg African Chamber of Business and Cape Town export promotion agency, Wesgro.

Provincial government and city government invested R60m in Dreamworld – which has prudently been renamed Cape Town Film Studios. Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool described the R60m investment as “cheese in the trap” to catch the additional R400m of investment needed for the project.

Singh, the chairperson of Cape Town Film Studios, said that with the shareholder agreements in place critical mid-year targets in 2008 could now be met terms of the Environmental Management Plan and funding agreements.

These, he said, related to the upgrading of the R301 highway, bulk infrastructure and the studio buildings.

The Cape Town Film Studio will be located in Faure, just outside of Cape Town.

Singh reckoned the studio could boost the local economy by creating thousands jobs in the construction phase over the next three years. He added that many jobs would be permanent once the film studio was operational.

The Western Cape attracts a surfeit of international film work every year, ranging from commercials to full length feature movies.

The Cape Film Commission estimated that the industry has a direct annual turnover of more than R2.65bn and estimated to have contributed an indirect annual turnover of more than R3.5bn to the country’s GDP through the multiplier effect.

Source: Fin24