ABOUT US

How It All Began …

During a rainy summer’s day in 1961, a 15 year old boy and his brother in law were sitting on the front stoep of their home discussing their future business prospects.

They both had a passion for movies and so the vision of Zenith Film Distributors was born, with no experience and very little capital the partners started acquiring 8mm silent films.

Soon after, they started showing films commercially in schools and community halls. However they couldn’t see themselves as cinema owners. Their ultimate aim was to get into film distribution and this wasn’t easy. Firstly they had to work from home, secondly each film had to be rewound before it was given to the next customer, this would mean working till wee hours of the morning.

Another major problem however was how to overcome film classifications. During the good old days certain films were meant for certain audiences only. So how was a non white film distributor going to distribute films meant for whites only. These were some of the challenges that needed to be faced. The rewards however were great because the who’s who of the country would pull up in front of a very old dilapidated house in fancy vehicles to hire the very latest 16mm films.

It was an extremely hard road to travel. The partners were continually harassed by police at all hours of the day and night but their sheer determination and love of movies has led them to become a force to be reckoned with and let’s not forget experience because with experience comes wisdom so as the trend changed from 8mm to 16mm to 35mm to Video to DVD and then Blu-Ray so did the vision of the company. That is why today, 56 years later, they can claim with pride to be the only true opposition to the major film studios in the country.

Impact Video now carries a range of over 2000 DVD titles in different genre of product.

Why are we so successful?

That’s easy, we are the only company that has two board meetings everyday the 30 minute drive to work in the morning and 50 minute drive back home every afternoon.