kagablog

1. GC: Why was the film shot on cellphone? Was it in response to the challenge of the technology?

AK: The natural evolution of film is away from film and towards digital projections technologies. In 1996 I realized this and shot the first full length feature film to be filmed on dv tape and blown up to 35mm. This was in Holland where the film NAaR DE KLOTE! (WASTED!) opened in 93 cinemas around the country. The mobile phone camera provides film with its next great historical milestone, and evidence of this is that all over the world many festivals are springing up to advance this direction. Also of course in the Hollywood embracing of this medium, with Spike Lee doing a mobile film for Nokia. I am very proud that it was South Africa that was the first country to produce a full length feature film generated on the mobile phone technology.

2. GC: I note that the film is a bit pixelated in places – I felt it adds to the sense of seediness, vagueness, yet is also very evocative. It also gives an immediate documentary, home movie-type feel. The characters also use cellphones in the movie, to film action, so one has the sense of a film within a film.

AK: Yes indeed Gary, you are spot on here. This effect is described in literary criticsm as the mise-en-abyme. In Holland it is called the Droste effect. For those familiar with the paintings of M. C. Escher the film will provide a haunting memory, a trace of that creepy, eery feeling ogets when spatial and temporal “reality” is played with. This vertiginous feeling is for me the absolute essence of the cinea experience, of the unheimlich.

3. GC: You mentioned that Alphaville was an influence and I can see traces – the mysterious secret agent, the hotels, the women, the dark gangsterish streets, but also the sense of redemption at the end of the movie. I also see a Lynchian influence, in various ways I was reminded of Blue Velvet.

AK: You are so right Gary. I believe that Lynch is one of the greatest living film makers, although the film of his that really blew my head off was MULHOLLAND DRIVE. that has to be the best film about film about film ever. Dizzying.

4. GC: In the first moments of the film, Grace asks” Who are you, Sugar Man?” I feel this introduces a main theme of the film, that of identity, searching for identity, hiding identities ( such as the Sugars not using their real names, and the anonymous Wallets). Later Selene even refers to Sugar Man wearing a mask, which he says is his business mask.

AK: Yes indeed, THE MASK. Gary I am going to take the liberty of quoting French philosopher Jean Baudrillard on this question as it was this quote that fuelled my thinking about this issue:

“One has to see through the identity to bring forth the mask. One has to see through the truth to bring forth the illusion and the secret alterity. The more subtle approach is that which takes reality for a mask.”

from “Fragments”

5. GC: The film is set on Christmas Eve – it’s a night of tensions: on the one hand it is, for many, a joyous family time, but as Sugar Man points out, it can also be a depressing time – for the lonely that is, after all, it is from the lonely that money is made. It is also traditionally a peaceful time - Sugar Man says “it’s Christmas Eve, what could possibly go wrong?” but of course “bad things happen…” There is this constant tension of “innocence” (like the Sugars eating popcorn) and experience, good and evil. There is also the fairy tale intro: “Once upon a time…” Any comment?

AK: The feelgood movie genre is one I have always viewed with a certain malevolent distaste; this film introduces South African audiences to the feelbad movie, a genre of my own that I have finely honed and shaped over the past twenty years.

6. GC: I see a lot of similarities between Sugar Man and Christ – with the Sugars as his disciples, and of course it is his favourite who will betray him, whom he actually invites to betray/kill him – or am I reading too much into it?

AK: I remember very clearly at Yeoville Boy’s School (my primary school) and then later at Durban High School, the image of Christ hovering over the daily assembly, haunting the education I received with the idea that all of what we received was because of his extraordinary sacrifice. The Christian Nationalist education that all so-called white South Africans of my age received still pollutes and poisons our thinking and our emotions, political correctness alone is not enough to scour it away. This film is a contribution to that particular discussion, an ‘intervention’ .

7. GC: The city is also a major feature of the film – the streets, Hillbrow tower, the hotels and garages and buildings – anonymous and threatening. I picked up on a sense of Alphaville here.

AK: Alphaville is a seminal film of the sixties. Nowhere is the extreme horror of the modernist dystopia better realized. SMS Sugar Man updates this dystopian perspective in Johannesburg, a global postmetropolis.

8. GC: Most of the Sugars’ clients are black – with the exception of the chap at the end, but this client wasn’t arranged by Sugar Man, but by Atilla. Was there any reason for making the Sugars white and clients black? The one cellphone-glued-to-the ear client (played by Ryan Fortune) even refers to the Sugar as a ”white bitch”.

AK: The singular lack of sexually informed racial politics in our cinema is indicative of the juvenile state of the art in this country. It is time that our cinema grew up, that we grow up. Political correctness is a new mask. Getting underneath the mask-erade is what interests and excites me as a film maker.

9. GC: The film is filled with loneliness – Sugar Man’s loneliness, the loneliness of the Wallets, especially the married one (played by John Matshikiza) – the scene in which he asks Selene what her name is, calling her “Darling”, and she leaves without saying anything, is one of the saddest moments I have ever seen in a film. All this sex and transactions but sheer loneliness. A lot of the music in the film (composed by Michael Blake) lends to the feeling of sadness.

AK: I have to give full credit to John Matshikiza for digging very deep into himself, as an actor and as a man, and finding a character that is recognizable and deeply tragic. It was a great privilege for me to work with John, whose chemistry with leading actress Deja Bernhardt was, literally, heartbreaking.

10. GC: Sugar Man says “Money is God”, on Christmas Eve of all nights. There are close-up shots of money being counted, and it is money that binds Sugar Man and the Sugars together. Sex, relationships, trust and even life and death (the payment for the hit) seems to be purely a matter of money. Yet is the ugly world in which the movie takes place – of prostitution and weirdos and junkies – really any different from “respectable” transactions that take place everyday in the business world? People are bought and sold every day, without realising it. Any comments?

AK: Nail on the head Gary. The underworld microcosm of the film’s milieu serves of course as a reminder that this is how it’s down here in the new South Africa, the cashocracy.

11. GC: Any other comments

AK: I really appreciate your questions. They are rewarding. Nothing is so rewarding as the audience that brings so much to the work!