LAST week a Zimbabwe Heritage Trust (ZHT)-produced documentary ZANLA Comes to Town: Part Two won the Best Film and Best Director awards at the recently held Zimbabwe International Film Festival.
To some of us, this is an achievement that we cannot let go without putting it into its proper context.
We do not want the achievement to be forgotten and be a one-off thing.
We have appealed to our people to document our story as a sovereign Nation.
We have constantly repeated that it is critical that we take pen to paper to record the story of our journey, our aspirations and achievements.
And when that story is presented in motion picture, we cannot be more delighted.  
Through this wonderful documentary film, we have visually captured one of the essential pieces of our history critical for the purposes of instruction, education and maintaining a historical record.
While we have begun writing, let us also start creating a film archive that will collect and keep safe visual materials.
For instance, the ZHT production stands out as it provides both a social and political weapon against neocolonialism and Western machinations seeking to destroy our country.
This is a positive development with regards to preserving and perpetuating our history as film provides indelible images.
Our revulsion and horrified consciousness of the Jewish Holocaust is mostly as a result of the filmed images from the German concentration camps.
Our hatred of nuclear bombs and our knowledge of their devastation comes from the motion pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during, and after, the bombing in Japan.
But there are many massacres perpetrated against developing nations by the West that are not known, simply because there are no documented films or action movies about them.
Genocides and traumas that have gone unrecorded by motion picture such as the Nyadzonia and Chimoio Massacres or the mass starvation in Asia are not remembered and less present in public consciousness because of the lack of vivid images.
Many think Americans were victorious in Vietnam despite tonnes of books that chronicle how the US was defeated.
Many believe they were victorious because of the huge volume of motion pictures produced by the Americans.
The written word, though important, is more of a private production and consumed in solitude and usually over a long period.
But a film is both narrative and dramatic, a melding of text, image, sound and music experienced in one sitting.
When film-makers break the silence and share their experiences with the world, they strike chords in all of us.
Films have power.
They delight, enchant, touch, teach, recall, inspire, motivate and challenge.
 They help us understand.
They imprint indelible images in our minds.
What will happen if more of us move beyond the business-as-usual in the film industry and start making more documentaries and movies chronicling the journey we have travelled as a Nation?
There would be a greater understanding of our mission, our objectives and our aspirations as a Nation.
Like ZANLA Comes to Town: Part Two, let us have more content that is engaging and powerful.
Let’s capture all our history in motion picture.