Bridget Pickering

"I have been here a few times, this is my fourth or fifth time."

"Personally, for me, it's quite a good year. It's been an interesting year because when I first arrived, I came here with the project called Mama Africa, which was a series of films by female filmmakers, and I was one of the writers-directors but the product was being launched here so I really came to see what it was all about and get a sense of the environment."

"Normally, as a producer I work in a very intimate, on the ground, making decisions all the time but in Hotel Rwanda that just operated in very different ways because there's so much money at stake and the politics of that particular filmmaking are very different."

"That was a very different project because it was very much developed and produced as a Hollywood film. When you work with a product like that, you have a very minimal role. In a way, I represented the South African money and obviously was part of the production but it does operate on a very different level."

"The growth and rise of black talent is very slow, they aren't many and that's for different reasons also. Filmmaking is very hard so for young people to do that, not to earn a living, life is tough at home, they don't have families who can support them while they go to film schools, it's very difficult."