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In what South Africans might view as an unusual bit of casting, Variety reports that Oscar-winner and ex-American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls, Sex and The City, The Secret Life of Bees) has been signed to play the controversial Winnie Mandela in the independent film, Winnie. Oscar-nominated Darrell James Roodt (Yesterday, Sarafina! Cry, the Beloved Country) will direct.

According to Variety, the film starts shooting on 30 May in Johannesburg, Cape Town, the Transeki and Robben Island, where Winnie’s former husband, Nelson Mandela, was was incarcerated for 18 of his 27 years in prison.

The script is written by Roodt, Andre Pieterse and Paul L Johnson, based on Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob’s Winnie Mandela: A Life.

by Reed Johnson of The Los Angeles Times

Just 20 years ago, South Africa was commonly perceived as one of the most polarized, ill-starred places on the planet. Shackled by the racist system of apartheid, or legally enforced segregation, it was a nation divided against itself and shunned by the rest of the world as a pariah state. Today the world is looking at South Africa for very different reasons. This summer the country will become the first African nation to host the World Cup soccer tournament. As one of the most politically stable, democratic and relatively prosperous countries on a troubled continent, South Africa is regarded as a model by many of its neighbors.

It’s also a growing tourist destination. Another influential outside party is taking a renewed interest in South Africa these days: Hollywood. A century after D.W. Griffith filmed his 13-minute black and white silent fable ;The Zulu’s Heart,; South Africa and the U.S. film industry appear to be entering a new phase in their complex, sometimes tortuous relationship. This year, at least three films with one type of Hollywood connection or another to South Africa have opened or will be opening in theaters. Like a great many of the films made by South Africans in recent decades, they not surprisingly are preoccupied with race and class relations, either as text or subtext.

The most unconventional is last summer’s hit ;District 9,; directed and co-written by Neill Blomkamp, a native South African now based in Vancouver. Produced by Peter Jackson, it’s a science fiction tale about persecuted space aliens that’s also a thinly veiled allegory of South Africa under apartheid.

Steve Jacobs’ “Disgrace” was adapted from Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee’s tough novel and released this fall. It stars John Malkovich as a middle-age Cape Town professor who becomes exiled within his own country as he adjusts to the challenges of post-apartheid’s topsy-turvy social realities. The movie received substantial financing from government sources in Australia, where Coetzee now lives.

Anna-Maria Monticelli, the screenwriter and producer of ;Disgrace; (and wife of its director), said she believes that the film speaks to issues of tolerance, reconciliation and socioeconomic justice that resonate both within and outside South Africa. ;It is for smart people, this film,; she said. ;It’s pushing you to go places where you’ve not necessarily been before and to understand.

Opening next month will be Clint Eastwood’s ;Invictus,; a historical drama about the upset win by South Africa in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which helped unite blacks and whites during the crucial early months of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. It stars Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the team captain.

In an interview, one of the film’s producers, Lori McCreary, who also co-produced the 1993 South Africa-set film ;Bopha!; — which her Revelations Entertainment production company partner Freeman directed — called the country ;a great place to make films.; Among the factors she cited were a favorable currency exchange rate, a variety of arresting shooting locations and one of Africa’s deepest pools of talent. More than 200 of the 240 crew members and 62 of 70 actors who worked on ;Invictus; were South African, she added.

;The U.S. is more interested in South Africa than at any point probably since the ‘94 election,; McCreary said. ;The world is looking at South Africa.; As for the coincidences of timing and subject matter between ;Invictus; and this summer’s World Cup, she said, ;I wish I could say it was planned. I think it’s fortuitous for us.;

A fourth film, Anthony Fabian’s “Skin,” a British-South African production that recently opened in U.S. theaters, relates the improbable-but-true story of Sandra Laing, a South African woman whose mixed-race ancestry wreaked havoc on her sense of personal identity and her family relations. It stars Sophie Okonedo and Sam Neill as the girl’s conflicted father.

These foreign and semi-foreign films join a growing number of home-grown South African movies grappling with the country’s painful race-relations legacy, including Gavin Hood’s ;Tsotsi; (2005), shot in Johannesburg and a Soweto township, about the enduring hardships and disillusionments of the post-apartheid era. Adapted from a novel by playwright Athol Fugard, it won the Academy Award for best foreign language film.

South Africa appears eager to attract more Hollywood and foreign production. Cape Town Film Studios, Cape Town Film Studiosbilled as the first Hollywood-quality production studio to be built in southern Africa, is under construction and expects to produce its first movie next year.

Located on the outskirts of Cape Town, the new private facility will comprise 75,000 square feet of sound stages, plus support facilities, workshops and production offices, said Nico Dekker, chief executive officer. Dekker, who will be visiting several Hollywood film companies this month, said the studios would provide a base for South African filmmakers and visiting crews. It is receiving financial support from the municipal, provincial and federal governments, a mark of the country’s enthusiasm in promoting film production.

;If you go 10 years back, there were hardly any foreign features shooting in South Africa or doing post-production or production of any kind,; Dekker said. ;We are now entering the more mature phase where South Africa can offer the full spectrum of production and even talent.;

Dekker specifically credits ;District 9; with showing ;our colleagues in Hollywood; that a mainly South African cast and crew could make a $30-million feature film with the look of a $100-million movie. He said the movie served as ;a big wake-up call; for what South African filmmakers, both independently and in league with outsiders, may be capable of in the post-apartheid era.

Uneven portrayals

Hollywood’s attention toward South Africa has waxed and waned in the century since Griffith shot his short film, which the independent filmmaker Peter Davis in his 1996 book ;In Darkest Hollywood: Exploring the Jungles of Cinema’s South Africa; named as the first Western-made movie about South Africa. The movie is a caricatured story of a ;good; Zulu, a noble savage who rescues a Boer mother and daughter from being killed by a band of barbaric ;bad; Zulus.

Given Griffith’s own checkered reputation as a racist and Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, it was perhaps inevitable that his film about South Africa would set an uneven tone for the country’s relationship with Hollywood.

A number of problematic Hollywood film genres, notably the black-white ;buddy; movie such as ;In the Heat of the Night; with Sidney Poitier (1967) have cropped up in films dealing with South Africa. In ;The Wilby Conspiracy; (1975), Poitier was paired as a South African revolutionary who teams with a white Englishman ( Michael Caine) to thwart a racist Afrikaner cop.

This black-white friendship trope resurfaced during the end-of-apartheid period in such films as Richard Attenborough’s fact-based ;Cry Freedom; (1987), which focuses on the relationship between the white journalist Donald Woods ( Kevin Kline) and the slain black activist Steve Biko ( Denzel Washington); and Euzhan Palcy’s ;A Dry White Season; (1989), about the call to conscience of a white school teacher ( Donald Sutherland).

Critics and scholars differ over whether such parallels point to an inventive repackaging of familiar genres or a myopic Hollywood projection of one country’s social reality onto that of another. Critics have argued that friendships and social contact between blacks and whites during the apartheid epoch were almost unknown and these relationships are misleading and anachronistic. And since these movies were made almost entirely by white and non-South African directors, the argument continues, blacks had no opportunity to offer an alternative cinematic vision of race relations.

The other criticism made by Davis and others is that Hollywood, foreign and expatriate white South African filmmakers related their South African stories almost exclusively through the eyes of white protagonists while relegating black Africans to the role of ;exotics; and ciphers, typically as villains, noble savages or faithful servants — the same roles they tended to occupy in Hollywood.

Perhaps no movie suggests the difficulties of representing South Africa in film, let alone of predicting how global audiences will respond to those depictions, better than ;The Gods Must Be Crazy; (1980). Jamie Uys’ film, shot in Botswana and South Africa, about an isolated bushman’s picaresque journey to get rid of a Coca-Cola bottle that’s been dropped from an airplane, was an international smash that spawned several sequels. Yet the debate goes on over whether the film panders to an image of black Africans as childlike and naive or whether the movie offers a smartly satiric and prescient view of African racial politics and creeping globalization.

During the transition from apartheid, at least one South African director, Darrell Roodt, turned out a number of movies that skillfully applied a white native son’s liberal social conscience to an increasingly Hollywood-friendly template. Roodt’s output includes ;A Place of Weeping; (1986), ;Jobman; (1990), the musical ;Sarafina!; (1992), with Whoopi Goldberg, and a remake of ;Cry, the Beloved Country; (1995), based on Alan Paton’s classic novel, with Richard Harris and James Earl Jones. More recently, with ;Zimbabwe; (2008), Roodt turned his camera on the story of a young AIDS orphan struggling to survive with her brother in South Africa’s imploding next-door neighbor.

Experience suggests that the impact of Hollywood on South African film culture may continue to be mixed. Adam Haupt, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, said that in the past, American film actors sometimes have been cast in roles that otherwise might’ve gone to South African performers. He questions whether successful South African filmmakers and actors may be tempted to leave home to pursue the Hollywood dream. And he asks whether Hollywood’s relentless quest to market films to the widest possible global audiences will lead to a watering down of South African content.

Meanwhile, well-regarded contemporary South African (or partly South African) films such as ;Tsotsi,; Oliver Schmitz’s ;Hijack Stories; (2000), which raises questions about how U.S. gangster films influence African black male identity, and Ralph Ziman’s “Jerusalema” (2008), based on the story of an underworld kingpin, usually struggle to elbow their way into the crowded, costly U.S. and European markets.

Hollywood has already left a heavy cultural footprint in South Africa, Haupt said. As a teenager, he grew up watching imported U.S. films and television hits such as ;Miami Vice.; ;While the townships were burning, you were getting the latest TV shows.; What’s more, he said, a country that has produced writers such as Coetzee, Fugard and Nadine Gordimer, plus world-renowned musicians, actors and artists, doesn’t need Hollywood to fill some imagined cultural vacuum.

But if nothing else, Hollywood’s renewed attention suggests that a country that used to be ;a world apart; (to borrow the title of Chris Menges’ apartheid-era film) is advancing further into global consciousness. ;I think it’s a bit of a coming of age,; Dekker said. ;There’s a spirit of like we’re getting somewhere now.;

this article first appeared on joburgcentral.co.za

The brainchild of award-winning South African filmmakers Vincent Moloi and Norman Maake, Vuma - A Music Revolution, is a six-part documentary series that captures the essence of the local dance music genre, Kwaito. It will be broadcast on SABC1 during the festive season, from 1 December until mid January 2010.

Creating an in-depth understanding of Kwaito’s beginning and influence in the early 1990s, the series tells the untold story of South African youth with all its sophisticated dynamics, through music. It profiles Kwaito legends Oskido, Mandla Spikiri, Thebe, Bruce “Dope” Sebitlo, Mjokes and numerous other groups like Trompies, Boom Shaka, Alaska, Chakaroski, Mafikizolo, Bongo Maffin and many other dancers, producers and club DJs that were at the centre of Kwaito. This formerly underground culture has now become mainstream.

The individual experiences of owners of the successful, black-owned production company, Kalawa Jazmee, form part of this collage of stories. These are individuals who were at the forefront of pioneering this lucrative, independent music industry, which has grown into an avenue for self-expression for many young people.

Moloi and Maake have joined forces to form Glowstars, a production company that focuses on telling the stories of urban youth culture. Both of these filmmakers have worked as directors across genres in the local and international film industry. This is their first film project as co-directors.

“Norman and I are both avid lovers of film and Kwaito, and after years of talking about a project we could do together, Kwaito was a natural choice. We know that iKasi will love this series and we hope the general South African audience will enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it. This has been a two-years labour of love.” says Moloi.

“Kwaito is an important part of us as young South Africans and as film practitioners it is our patriotic duty to capture such history the best way we know how,” adds Maake.

By Katie Miller

Published November 4, 2009

A silent and visually stunning experimental documentary from South Africa, has won the 2nd annual Africa in Motion (AiM) short film competition. 3SAI: A Rite of Passage is the work of South African film-maker Paul Emmanuel.

The film challenges the viewer to empathise with fresh recruits at the 3SAI military base as their hair is shaved. Undercut with ambiguous and abstracted images of the vast plains of the Karoo, the monotony of the action and their initial indifference evolve to reveal intimate mirror images of their faces and feelings, exposing a vulnerability behind the rhythms of a production line set-up.

The film was screened as part of the Africa in Motion Film Festival (October 22-November 1, 2009), the UK’s largest African Film Festival, which takes place at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh. The winner was awarded £1,000 to help them with their filmmaking career.

The judging panel consisted of filmmaker, journalist and regular on BBC 2’s The Culture Show, Zina Saro-Wiwa; Director of the Scottish Documentary Institute, Noe Mendelle; and respected film critic, writer and producer Mark Cousins.

Film-maker Paul Emmanuel spoke of his delight at winning the competition: “I am absolutely thrilled to have my film selected for such a prestigious festival, and winning this competition is a wonderfully affirming experience for me! It is so exciting that an interpretive, and experimental film is being shown beyond the art gallery or museum-going-audience too! I hope that others from my country will be inspired to take this leap of faith and realise their dream!”

Jury member Mark Cousins says of the competition: “Short films are the spurts of life, the new shoots, of the film world. It is great that Africa in Motion is focusing on them. That’s where the discovery and vitality is. The short film competition, and its considerable prize, is a brilliant way of putting the festival’s money where its mouth is, and giving a fillip to the zingy and daring new African directors. I am delighted to be part of it.”

So what is the 14-minute 3SA, a 2008 experimental production about?

This film challenges the viewer to empathise with fresh recruits at the 3SAI military base while their obligatory hair shave changes them irrevocably. Undercut with ambiguous and abstracted images of the vast plains of the Karoo, the monotony of the action and their initial indifference evolve to reveal intimate mirror images of their faces and feelings, exposing a vulnerability behind the rhythms of a production line set-up.

Paul Emmanuel was born in 1969 in Kabwe, Zambia. He graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa in 1993. In 1997, The Ampersand Foundation made Emmanuel the first recipient of the prestigious Ampersand Fellowship, which afforded him a three-month residency in New York. His first solo show in 2000, at the Open Window Gallery, Pretoria, was followed by three subsequent solo exhibitions in the Western Cape and Johannesburg in 2003 - 2005. Paul Emmanuel was in 2002 awarded first prize for AIR ON THE SKIN, in the Schumann-Sasol Wax Art Competition.

Emmanuel employs various media, including photography and film, to reveal layered visions concerned with his identity as a young white male living in post-apartheid South Africa. In 2004, Phase I of his ephemeral memorial installation, THE LOST MEN PROJECT, was launched on the Grahamstown National Arts Festival main visual arts programme to public acclaim. In April 2007, phase II of this project took place in Maputo, Mozambique. In September 2008, his touring museum exhibition entitled TRANSITIONS premiered at The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, featuring his critically acclaimed short art film, 3SAI A RITE OF PASSAGE. Emmanuel lives and works in Johannesburg.

5 November 2009

Claire Angelique, 2010 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for film, is an explosion of boundary-pushing creative expression, in the most literal sense of the word. She is also the first female recipient of this award.

Angelique is not only one of South Africa’s edgiest upcoming scriptwriters and filmmakers, but also an award-winning choreographer, dancer and video-artist. In between juggling multiple creative careers, she has managed 15 bands and DJ’s, coordinated national community radio youth programmes, ventured into public relations, and writes for many of the major contemporary South African arts, music and entertainment publications. All of this at barely 30!

“This award has put me on the best natural high I’ve had since being green-lighted into the production of my first Feature film My Black Little Heart,” said Angelique about winning the Young Artist Award.

My Black Little Heart, a dark and deeply personal narrative exposing Durban’s sinister side, was produced by Zentropa Entertainment with cinematography by Slumdog Millionaire’s Anthony Dod Mantle. It featured on the 2009 National Arts Festival’s Film programme in Grahamstown, after premièring at the Durban International Film Festival in 2008.

“To be assaulted by a South African film made by a young Durban girl which is totally original and unique and which is made with a total respect and understanding of film language is very rare,” said Trevor Steele Taylor, National Arts Festival committee member for film. “She is one the best that we have in South Africa, and her talent should not be ignored.”

“First of all, its vindication of one’s potential ability,” said Angelique when asked about the value of the award for her as a young artist. “I think any artist at some point, or more realistically at many intervals, is gripped by the icy hand of insecurity. Questions that seep into your creative consciousness are no longer conducive to new ideas or astounding revelations that can be transported into your chosen medium, but irritating stabs of self-doubt. Awards won are like glimpses into your audiences psyche, they’re a gift that qualifies your endeavours,” she added.

Angelique graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Television from the Cape Town International Film School in 2004, after completing a B.A. majoring in Drama / Performance Studies, English and Internet Science through the University of Natal. She was presented with the Most Outstanding Student and Student Most Likely to Succeed awards from the Cape Town International Film School in 2002.

In 2004 she was the first South African filmmaker to be selected, from 3 600 applicants, to attend the Berlin International Film Festival’s Berlinale Talent Campus, and was also a scholarship recipient for the New York University’s Cannes Film intensive course, run by Robert Nickson.

In 2007, she was a winner of the SA Script Institute award for the script of the feature film White Mountain, and in the same year she also bagged a Levis award for SA Music Video Directing, as well as a Mondi Shanduka Creative Journalism award. Her short films, documentaries, music videos and video-art pieces have been screened at galleries and festivals across South Africa and abroad.

“Claire is unique, a true individual,” said acclaimed South African film director Darryl James Roodt. “She sees the world in a way that no one else does.”

Angelique has also acted the lead role in theatrical productions like Viagra Falls and Daddy’s Little Girl, and has co-written a comic book based on one of her films. She is no stranger to the spotlight, having performed as a professional ballerina, diverging into contemporary African dance as one of the first non-black dancers with the Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre.

“I’m looking forward to getting down and dirty with the opportunity to create a new work,” said Angelique about her expectations for the year ahead. “I think my attitude, though I have created many music videos, shorts and documentaries, has always been to ‘go for a long film or go home’.” She will be focusing her creative efforts on two major projects in the following year, White Mountain and Upper Cuts, both full-length feature films.

“There is no artist more deserving of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award than Claire Angelique,” said filmmaker, writer, poet and fine artist Aryan Kaganof. “If she never makes another film after My Black Little Heart she will go down in history as the author of the most powerful South African film made to date.”

Angelique recalls that her creative flair has been evident from a very early age. “As a child I was always performing for anybody who would care to watch. I would disappear down the road, and my parents would find me dancing for neighbours on their lawn, whilst they sat transfixed by a five-year-olds’ play, performed for them whilst they ate their braai on the stoep!” She also had an intense love affair with books for as long as she can remember, always writing and keeping journals.

Angelique feels that the youth of South Africa are searching for art that encapsulates their dreams, their fashions, their disgusts, their frustrations and their independent spirit, which she feels will be the future of South Africa. “The award is headed in the right direction by embracing the mind and soul that destroys, rethinks, then reassembles to embrace the new or unexplored. By embracing young artists we are embracing the future and rewarding a new generation’s point of view,” she said.

A school friend of Angelique’s reminded her recently that she told everyone, from the age of eight, that she would be a movie director and put all her friends in her films. “I don’t remember saying that at all, but it proved true,” she laughed.

starring Samuel L. Jackson, Juliette Binoche, Brendan Gleeson, Menzi Ngubane
screenplay by Ann Peacock, based on the novel Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog
directed by John Boorman

A wrongheaded film from a director responsible for a couple of masterpieces (Deliverance, Point Blank), a couple of cult classics (Excalibur, Zardoz), one of the best films of the ’90s (The General), a couple of unqualified disasters (Exorcist II: The Heretic, Leo the Last), and a few flicks that are just sort of middling there in-between grotesque (Where the Heart Is), winsome (Hope and Glory), and generally freaky (The Emerald Forest), In My Country–originally more provocatively titled Country of My Skull–finds itself closer to a disaster than to a noodle. It makes the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in post-Apartheid South Africa something of a Western problem instead of an African one (better were it elevated into a human one) and, worse, makes an illicit romance between two fictional characters, public radio journalist Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche, atrociously cast) and Washington Post journalist Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson), a metaphor for South Africa endeavouring to make love, not war.

A scene after a gruelling day of testimony from survivors and the bereaved of atrocities committed in the name of anti-terrorism (the sharp echo of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is the film’s most fascinating fallout) encapsulates the picture’s failings, with Anna, Langston, and what is essentially their native porter, Dumi (Menzi Ngubane), “comically” deciding that it’s a bad time to give up smoking. It’s an unbelievably self-satisfied moment that highlights just exactly how inadequate a foreground narrative like fictional lovers in a dangerous time can be when the background is something so visceral and horrific as decades of institutional malfeasance. If you actually care that these ciphers are moved by the horrorshow or, more, that eternally-scowling Langston is laying the wood to eternally-weeping Anna amid recreations of actual transcripts taken from the TRC hearings, then you probably liked Pearl Harbor and, as if more proof were needed, there’s something really wrong with you.

The rest of the piece plays out like a liberal version of an Ayn Rand polemic, positing a heroic viewpoint against a weak one in a series of pre-determined dialectics that should strike most viewers as childish and strident. Anna is the fall guy, an Afrikaner (at one point Langston says something like “…because you don’t sound Chinese,” to which anyone in their right mind would say, “You don’t sound Afrikaner, either, you sound French”) set up to say a lot of stupid things so that righteous black man Langston (when, exactly, did Jackson become the defender of African pride, by the by?) has the target and platform to rave on about genocide and the plight of the black man under a particularly odious heel. It all feels parsed in a way that’s pretty ugly, and it all seems artificial because these are, essentially, paper puppets engaged in fifth-grade sociology. There’s nothing that sounds stupider than a white person writing the lament of the oppressed.

Because the spectre of colonialism run amuck isn’t enough of a bogey, insert a fire-breathing colonel played by the great Brendan Gleeson and allow he and Jackson to have a randomly inserted, poorly written and shot mano-a-mano in Gleeson’s taxidermy-festooned den. (Shades of Norman Bates’ back-office, though the parallel goes unexplored.) And because the picture can’t quite bring itself to equate the actions of minor thugs to the actions of this major thug–even though it manages quite nicely to equate a mother demanding her son’s pickled hands back from the monster who kept them on his desk with an old man wanting to know why some policemen hacked down his fruit trees–at the end of the film, all this talk about healing the wounds of Africa with forgiveness is fed to the fire of vengeance once Gleeson’s brute is denied amnesty to a chorus of crowd-pleasing cheers. It takes a bigger person than me to embrace my torturer (I’ll never be caught in a spoon with Michael Bay, in other words), but when the message of In My Country is the miracle of the African ability to forgive, a little grave temperance when another man–no matter his sins–is sent to the gallows would be more than just welcome: it’s to be expected.-

Walter Chaw

At an event held in Johannesburg on 23 September in which South African pay-TV channel M-Net and cinema chain Nu Metro honoured Dr John Kani’s award-winning directorial debut, Nothing But The Truth, the imminent launch of the African Film Library’s new Video On Demand (VOD) website was announced.

An M-Net initiative, the African Film Library’s VOD website (www.africanfilmlibrary.com) features Nothing But The Truth and a host of other classic, award-winning feature films, shorts and documentaries from 50 years of the African continent’s film production. The online library allows you to search by director, genre or language, watch trailers and download the films of your choice.

Once launched, a wide selection of videos will be available for download. Consisting of award-winning works from more than 80 filmmakers including Senegalese Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Mambety, Yousef Chahine from Egypt and Haile Gerima from Ethiopia, the African Film Library is the largest online library of African films in the world. Through the imminent video-on-demand service, viewers will be able to easily pay for and download digitally remastered footage. Similar to a DVD rental service, they will have 24 hours access to the content. While the content is portable, the licence is not. Viewers can download the film on to a disc or flash drive, but will be required to pay again should they wish to watch it on another device or after the 24 hour period has expired.

M-Net CEO Patricia Scholtemeyer said that M-Net is proud to play a part in showcasing African film to the world. “Mike Dearham and his team have worked tirelessly on building this library and we are delighted that the African Film Library Video On Demand website will spread the continent’s special brand of cinematic magic around the globe.”

At the function, the Gauteng MEC for Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation, Nelisiwe Mbatha-Mtimkulu, handed over one of the awards to Dr Kani and praised him for his contribution to the Arts in South Africa.

Nothing But The Truth was originally conceived as a stage play by Kani in honour of his late brother. The film was adapted for the screen and released in 2008. Nu Metro has also released the film on DVD, following the launch of a print version of the play of which 300 000 copies have already been distributed to schools across the country as part of the English Alternative Language curriculum.

“The launch of Nothing But The Truth has given Nu Metro the means to further the ongoing relationship with M-Net in showcasing and launching local product on a variety of platforms,” said Debbie McCrum, General Manager of Nu Metro Films. “Nu Metro is extremely proud to be associated with this prestigious title especially in light of its profoundly far-reaching effect through the schools as well as on an entertainment level.”

Nothing But The Truth is a gripping investigation into the complex dynamic between those black South Africans who remained in the country and risked their lives to lead the struggle against apartheid and those who returned victoriously after living in exile. In New Brighton, South Africa, 63-year-old librarian Sipho Makhaya prepares for the return of the ashes of his brother Themba, recently deceased while in exile in London after gaining a reputation as a hero of the anti-apartheid movement.

The New York Times called Nothing But The Truth “a deeply felt portrait that delicately weaves the extraordinary and the ordinary in its characters’ lives.” It received the Silver Stallion and Peace Prize at Fespaco 2009, Best African Film and the Catholic Peace Prize at the Milan African Film Festival 2009 and Best Film at both the 2009 Yaounde and Harare Film Festivals.

Johannesburg is de grootste economische metropool van Afrika. De binnenstad is echter één van de meest gewelddadige gebieden van de wereld. De meeste kantoorpanden staan leeg of zijn gekraakt en worden bewoond door diverse groepen illegale Afrikanen uit naburige landen. Duizenden gelukzoekers proberen er een nieuw bestaan op te bouwen in de wetteloosheid van deze stedelijke jungle.

De stad maakt zich intussen op voor het WK- voetbal in 2010, hier kan Johannesburg zich op een positieve manier aan de wereld tonen. De binnenstad wordt schoongeveegd en er wordt alles aan gedaan om dit grootse evenement probleemloos te laten verlopen. Maar gaat dit lukken? En welke gevolgen heeft dit voor al die duizenden immigranten?

Rob Schröder is vanaf januari 2008 meerdere malen naar Johannesburg gegaan om de veranderingen in beeld te brengen. Is het mogelijk om deze stad vol hoop en angst te controleren en de binnenstad veilig en leefbaar te maken?

Hoe kun je überhaupt overleven in Johannesburg?

Deze documentaire is vanaf 23 september een week lang op het digitale kanaal Holland Doc 24 te zien.

Four South African films will premier at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) to be held from 4-13 September 2008 in Canada, Toronto.

Four South African films will premier at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) to be held from 4-13 September 2008 in Canada, Toronto.
Among the four local films that will screen at this year’s TIFF are three National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) funded films, Jesus and the Giant (by Akin Omotoso), Skin (by Anthony Fabian), Sea Point Days (by Francois Verster). In addition to the NFVF funded films to be screened at TIFF is Disgrace (by Steve Jacobs), a film adapted from a book by local Nobel Prize award in Literature winner, J.M. Coetzee.
NFVF has worked with the Co-director and Programmer of TIFF, Cameron Bailey to facilitate entry of South African films into the festival since 2004, when for the first time, TIFF had a special focus on South African film.

About the relationship between TIFF and the NFVF, Ryan Haidarian, NFVF’s Head of Production and Development says, “it has to be the best relationship we have with a festival. Having the co-director of the festival come down to South Africa every year for the past few years on scouting trips shows a tremendous amount of commitment for providing a platform for tales from this part of the world. We are extremely grateful for Cameron Bailey’s commitment to see and help South African cinema grow.”
The NFVF is also supporting director Akin Omotoso and Producer Robbie Thorpe of Jesus and the Giant and Sandra Laing whose life story is adapted on Skin to attend TIFF.

Director and producer Akin Omotoso is very excited about having audiences at TIFF seeing his work. “I am very excited! Toronto is one of the top film festivals in the world and it is an honor to have Jesus and The Giant screened there. This is also all the more exciting because the festival doesn’t usually program shorts”, says Omotoso.

Local Production Company, Moonlighting productions that are co-producers of the first South Africa/ United Kingdom co-production feature film Skin, will be attending TIFF for the film’s world premier. About Moonlighting’s expectations regarding Skin at TIFF, associate producer at Moonlighting, Dylan Voogt says, “We feel that Skin is a really compelling story, one that needs to be told. Although it is a uniquely African story it has certain universal truths that we believe will resonate with international audiences, so we are hopeful that it will be well received.”
Sea Point Days producer, Neil Brandt, says about TIFF that “the festival will provide the ideal international platform to launch the film onto the global festival circuit, and will hopefully be instrumental in bringing it to the attention of international broadcasters”.

The NFVF would like to congratulate all the local films that will be screened at TIFF this year. “It’s phenomenal to have films that we have supported being recognized by a prestigious film festival such as TIFF. The NFVF is consistently excited by the fact that we have had successive award winning films at TIFF with Hotel Rwanda a United Kingdom, South Africa and Italy Co-production which received the top prize under the category, AFG People’s Choice Award in 2004 and Tsotsi a co-production between the United Kingdom production company, UK Film and Television Production Company, MoviWorld from South Africa, the NFVF and IDC, which won the Audience Award at the 2005 TIFF”, says Haidarian.

About SA films at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival

Jesus and the Giant
This film is set in modern day Johannesburg. Directed by Akin Omotoso and Written by Aryan Kaganof it is shot entirely (save for the last shot of the film) on a digital stills camera. Over 7000 photographs have been stitched together to create movement. The effect gives the film a visceral intensity that relates to it’s theme of violence and redemption. The world around our characters is fractured, broken up, moments are frozen, other’s are faster than the speed of light. Set in the urban intensity of downtown Johannesburg Jesus is a special woman. Her eyes are windows on the world. She has powers she herself doesn’t understand but ultimately she is a warrior for peace. Then one day, her friend Mary arrives at her doorstep beaten. Jesus has to choose whether to continue to nurse Mary or take revenge on the deadly Giant. Director: Akin Omotoso

Skin
Skin, is one of the most bizarre and fascinating true stories to emerge from South Africa: Sandra Laing was a coloured child born in the 1950s to two white Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. The film follows Sandra’s thirty-year journey from rejection to acceptance, betrayal to reconciliation, as she struggles to define her place in a changing world — and triumphs against all odds. Shot in and around Johannesburg at the end of 2007, the film stars Sophie Okonedo as Sandra Laing, Sam Neill as her father Abraham and Alice Krige as her mother Sannie.Director: Anthony Fabian

Sea Point Days
Lying on the coast of Cape Town - South Africa’s most segregated city - there is one public space where everyone does seem to come together: the Sea Point Promenade and Municipal Pools. Set between city and ocean, this beautiful strip of “everymansland” offers a quirky and often entertaining mix of class, race, gender and religion: a place where South Africans of all backgrounds can experience happiness together… But is all as it appears? SEA POINT DAYS presents an unusual and impressionistic record of life at Cape Town’s Sea Point Promenade and municipal pools, using largely cinematic vignettes to explore issues of belonging, integration, nostalgia, happiness and identity in an ex-white South African neighbourhood. Director: Francois Verster

this article first appeared on the website of the nfvf

On 10 September, The Rose of Rhodesia, one of the earliest feature films made in South Africa, went online at the website of Australian film journal, Screening the Past.

Produced in 1918, The Rose of Rhodesia is a five-reel romance centred on a stolen diamond, an interracial friendship, and an anti-colonial uprising. The film impressed contemporary reviewers with its daring realism, spectacular outdoor locations, and casting of African actors in prominent roles. Considered lost for most of the last century, the film may claim to be the first fictional treatment of Zimbabwe in cinema.

Now fully restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum, The Rose of Rhodesia is being streamed together with a new musical soundtrack by acclaimed silent film composer Matti Bye. Accompanying the film is a special issue of Screening the Past, edited by Stephen Donovan and Vreni Hockenjos, in which specialists from a range of disciplines offer the first detailed analysis of this remarkable cinematic discovery.

Both film and journal issue are available now at www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast.

In the cities of the global South elites are often desperate to repress the reality of the shack settlement. Maps are printed in which shack settlements appear as blank spaces, laws are passed that assume that everyone can afford to live formally and, in the name of order and development, the poor are beaten out of the cities. The great elite fantasy is the creation of ‘world class cities’ – shiny, securitised nowherevilles in which the poor understand that their place is to live in some peripheral ghetto and only come into the city as menial workers. But from City of God to Slum Dog Millionaire and now District 9 cinema has put the shack settlement in the mall and at the heart of how Rio, Bombay and Johannesburg feature in the global imagination.

In District 9 the shacks in Jo’burg are inhabited by extraterrestrials which humans call prawns. Science fiction can, to borrow from the lexicon that the film’s hero Wickus van de (sic) Merwe has taken to the world, just be a load of kak. But, like all forms of fantasy, it can also be a dream of the present illuminating it with more power than the ordinary categories through which we see the world. When it can illuminate aspects of reality hidden by ordinary ways of seeing it can reveal those ways of seeing to be the real fantasy.

District 9 is set in something very near to contemporary South Africa – Mahendra Raghunath reads the television news, the red ants swarm through the shacks with their crowbars and the human rights activists demonstrating outside the shacks are vastly less effective than the xenophobic mobs. But the film also evokes the past. Apartheid is everywhere from the ubiquity of white and male power to the peculiar type of nerd that Wikus van de Merwe’s character parodies. District 9 also reaches into a vision of the future. Van de Merwe works for a multinational corporation rather than the state. Multinationals, like Group 4 Securicor, are already in the business of beating the poor into their place but they take instruction from the state. Here, in a staple of nightmare visions of the future, the state seems to be a junior partner to the multinational.

By weaving past, present and future into one cinematic vision District 9 steps out of the all too easy distinction between an absolute break between bad apartheid and good democracy to look at how some processes of exclusion endure or mutate as we move from one political system to another. Some reviewers, referring to their experience of apartheid evictions, have written about how the eviction scenes have a strangely hyper real feel despite the fact that the evicted are fantastical aliens. But these scenes are also a hyper real description of contemporary evictions. The bureaucrat who is ‘here to assist you’ by destroying your home, the clipboards, the helicopters, the red ants, the casual and contemptuous exercise of arbitrary violence, the assumption that the shack settlement is a zone outside of the ordinary rules of society and the relentless presumption of criminality are all very real aspects of our society right now.

Shacks in Johannesburg have always housed aliens. Apartheid turned most black South Africans into aliens in their own country. In democratic South Africa we turned Mozambicans and Zimbabweans into aliens. The obvious value of turning the shack dweller into a real alien is that the film can deal with the continuities in the processes by which we turn people into aliens, contain them, criminalise them, beat them and then evict them ‘for their own good’. District 9 confront these continuities head on and so although it is a fantasy it contains more reality than we’re likely to find in many of the spaces that produce, circulate and authorise the official consensus. It shows contemporary development-speak in which the only real issue is the ‘pace of delivery’ to be a fantasy as ridiculous as it is perverse.

After all, we tell ourselves that the new order has made a decisive break with the essential logic of apartheid as we are driving shack dwellers and street traders out of our cities at gun point. We tell ourselves that we have a new order founded on human rights and protected by the best constitution in the world as we exclude migrants and the poor from that order. We tell ourselves that building stadiums and ‘eradicating’ street traders and shack settlements will bring us into a new era of prosperity while we are actively and often violently make the poor poorer.

The reality is that we have, at all levels of society, colluded to exclude some people from those who count as real citizens. This exclusion is often built into our speech. Some of us call others Makwerekwere. The state conflates ‘illegal immigrant’s with ‘criminals’. It conflates the theft of electricity cables to sell the copper with ‘illegal electricity connections.’ Exclusion is also being actively built into the structures of our cities. Shack dwellers are removed, often at gun point, to peripheral ghettoes. The reality is that some people and some spaces are treated as if they are outside of the law. The state, whether wielded by the DA or the ANC, engages in openly criminal behaviour towards the poor.

People who cannot afford to live their lives according to the rules of a society that assumes that everyone can be a consumer are usually understood in two ways by elites. They are either dangerous criminals who need to be repressed or childlike incompetents who need to be placed under some form of tutelage. District 9 makes a welcome break from this consensus, which is another elite fantasy, when it shows that the aliens have a weapon. In contemporary South Africa those weapons are the road blockade, the vote strike and the land occupation.

But just as our move from apartheid to post-apartheid changed who we turn into aliens but didn’t put aside the assumption that we should construct our society against the alien this film has its own aliens. In District 9 the Nigerians are, as in Jerusalema, another recent film about Jo’burg, presented through the basest racist stereotype. The depiction of the Nigerians is so extreme that many reviewers have concluded that it was intended to illustrate that as one alien is humanised another is created. But the film maker’ s comments don’t lend much weight to this interpretation. It seems that the film has inadvertently reproduced exactly what it set out to overcome. Perhaps this is its key lesson. As we humanise one alien we create another.

By Richard Pithouse. Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University.

Creative Commons License Please attribute The South African Civil Society Information Service (www.sacsis.org.za) as the source of this article. For more information, please see our Copyright Policy.

i’m feeling slightly overcome after watching the film “disgrace”…and having now created the appropriate conditions: fire lit, gorecki’s sorrows begun, the red wine opened, i’ve set the scene for the romantic spirit, the tragedy…because within it’s despair, the byron and blake of the film course through, that solitude of the romantics…

but mainly after the film, i was struck dumb by the country, by this place i’m living in…and wondering why i don’t write more about it…what world is it i’m living in?…there’s this world out there which everyone and the mail and guardian seems to know about and keeps talking about…but it’s as much my reality as hollywood is the real of america…there’s this vast discrepancy between my life and experience of living in “a country” and that story told publicly by others, the media, the novelists, the documentary movie makers & etc – it seems like another place…or maybe the past or the future…like a rumour…some already distant landscape…

the movie is set supposedly in grahamstown, but it isn’t…i sit there in the grahamstown cinema watching this lie, this american playing the stoic south african…and it seems so real and heart rending, and he’s so honest (is john c, and maybe also john m) about his own fuckedupness and inability to feel and to relate and his staunch moralism and rationalism and yet one admires his cold gaze, his unsentimental appraisal…

but i’m so completely removed from this kind of writing, this kind of life…and yet i think then – what is my scene…?…where is my writing coming from? all of coetzee’s books are so rooted in his context…even now writing so authentically about australia since moving there, but my words are so rootless, my writing is so candyflossed, intangible, without awareness of my surroundings…i’m up in the air man, i put on a play set in prague about a therapist? come on dude – what the fuck?…perhaps it’s true what louise says, that i’m operating largely in terms of ignorance, all the time, unaware of my surroundings, not in contact with the world, a kind of sloppiness of consciousness…what is it i’ve been doing all this time?

the movie made me think of how fugard and coetzee have made this country and it’s pains and paradoxes so central to their work, whereas i have a hard time getting out of my mind, i mean, of actually conceiving of a world out there… where is that world?…that world of the “picture portrait of south africa” and what it seems like objectified from the outside?…impossible to put it together with what it’s like “from the inside”…and yet – what inside?…what is “this country” like from the inside? there’s no country here at all, man….i have to do some marking tomorrow and prepare my classes for monday, that’s this country…my wife forbids me to give money to the mad beggar woman when she bangs on the door at night..

The Satyr of Springbok Heights, a technologically groundbreaking South African film which currently screening in the USA and now also in South Africa. It mades its Johannesburg premiere on Saturday 5 September at NuMetro Montecasino in Fourways, as part of its national run at the Out in Africa Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. It can also be seen on Wednesday 9 September at 18:45 with director Robert Silke and producer Aaron Scheiner present for Q&A’s after the screenings. It then moves to Cape Town.

In a first for the Out in Africa festival, the film will be screened in high definition video, which is the new high quality format found in high end Blu-ray disc players and due to be launched by the SABC in time for the world cup next year. “Blu-ray and High-Def is going to become a democratising force in filmmaking, since it allows low-budget producers (read South Africans) to screen at cinemas in a quality that begins to compete with traditional 35mm film,” said Robert Silke, the film’s Cape Town based director.

The Satyr of Springbok Heights is, according to Silke, a ‘mockumentary’ black comedy filmed in the genre of BBC’s The Office and centres around a sectional title apartment block in the centre of Cape Town. “Springbok Heights is an Art-Deco gem of exquisite proportions,” says Out in Africa Festival Director Nodi Murphy but, she continues, “not so exquisite are its notorious residents.”

“The film is a black comedy about poor whites living on the fringes of the new South Africa, and the unrequited love triangle that keeps them all stuck in the same building,” says director Robert Silke.

The film returns to South Africa after a successful run at the USA’s Rhode Island International Film Festival, and has just been announced as part of the Official Selection for the High Definition Film Festival to be held at Sony Laboratories on New York’s Madison Avenue in October.

Tickets for Johannesburg are limited and can be booked by visiting www.numetro.co.za or phoning (086) 110 0220. For more information and to buy the DVD, visit www.springbokheights.co.za

The new Afrikaans-language feature film, Karate Kallie – Die Hele Movie, releases at the South African cinema circuit from 18 September. Based on the short film Karate Kallie by Willem (Wimpie) Van der Merwe, the feature version was written and directed by Van der Merwe and executive produced by Charl Groenewald.
Ster-Kinekor Distribution will release the film English subtitles, with the DVD available from Ster-Kinekor Home Entertainment in December

Says Groenewald: “We believe the film will have broad appeal because of its universal themes - love, pride, respect – which cross gender, race, language and even national boundaries.”

Produced by Pia van Rensburg, Karate Kallie – Die Hele Movie features Wynand van Vollenstee (Kallie); Mike Smuts as his brother, Mike; Leani Lerm playing his love interest, Annetjie; and Petrus Harmse in the role of bully Fritz. They are joined by several seasoned actors including Marga van Rooy, Ben Kruger, Henrietta Gryffenberg, Marhette van Huyssteen and Richard van der Westhuizen. Newcomers Solomon Cupido and the feisty Carmilla Mosavel round out the cast.

Van der Merwe graduated cum laude in 2006 with a B-Tech degree in Scriptwriting and Directing from Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). The Karate Kallie short film generated something of a cult following after its frequent airings on pay-TV broadcaster M-Net since 2007. It also garnered numerous awards, played at a number of film festivals and has spread as far as the DRC, Tanzania and Afghanistan.

2009 September 4
by andries du toit

You have to admit: As a premise for a movie it is pretty unpromising. An alien spaceship comes to rest over Johannesburg. Instead of conquering the planet, the aliens turn out to be in crisis: malnourished and in need of rescuing. They end up living in a local slum, crammed together in a rusty shantytown. When human Joburgers complain, a company is called in to move them – but things get out of hand, and it all escalates into car chases and gun-fights. Stated like this, who would be blamed for deciding to give it a miss? It is hard to figure out what kind of movie it could be. Some kind of half-baked take on District 6, set in the wrong city? An American skop skiet en donder movie, with Parktown Prawns as the baddies? When I first heard about the movie, I dismissed it without a thought; and indeed, even today, with the movie doing well at the box office, some reviewers and commentators seem reluctant to take it seriously.

Well, I’ve been to see it and I personally think it is the best movie I have yet seen about South Africa – and specifically, one of the most pentetrating, disconcerting and subversive meditations on the nature of racism and repression in the post-colonial world. District 9 is fresh and transgressive, hilariously funny and absolutely horrifying: utterly brutal, sly, streetwise and in your face. It’s not a voice from the ghetto – it is, completely and incontrovertibly, a white voice – but is a voice from the postcolonial periphery; a voice speaking harshly, grittily and urgently about the surrealism of racism and the confluence of violence and normality here at the edges of the West’s old empire.

But to whom does it speak? Throughout the film, one of my most recurrent thoughts was: how many people who are not from this country will get what is going on here? So many of its references, points and jokes would make sense only to someone who lived here during the years of Apartheid. To some extent the movie is successful because it works on two levels: an international audience can enjoy it simply as a sci-fi thriller, while at the same time there is another layer of meaning, accessible only to those who share the filmmaker’s cultural and political frame of reference. But the key to the film, its centre, lies in its local subtext – while its iconography and genre conventions would be familiar only to hardcore science fiction aficionados.

In some ways, of course, the film’s insistent local-ness is the first thing most critics have noticed about it. The South African mise en scene is precisely and affectionately realised. It’s all there, and beautifully done: the welter of South African accents, black and white (so thick that the producers give us subtitles much of the time), the incessant Afrikaans swearing and obscenity; the endless local cultural references. The movie has a lot of fun with this, parading its provincial roots with a kind of delighted embarassment. The hero Wikus’s tacky Benoni home; his awful relatives; his fading-beauty of a wife; the earnest academics from ‘Kempton Park University,’ spouting platitudes at the camera in their crap hairstyles and shabby academic clothes… we’ve seen it all a million times before, on Special Assignment and Carte Blanche. All the delights of our own ethnoscape – all the more pleasing because it is done with such a light, subversive touch. No wonder South African audiences love it: at the screening where I saw it, the darkness was alive with ripples of laughter throughout the movie.

But more is at stake here. This is not just a remake of Alien with people shouting fok a lot. The movie’s verisimilitude comes with an agenda, and the reality it seeks to describe is very specific. For what you seeing is not just South Africa, but that South Africa that we think we’ve left behind, that we think we’ve forgotten … until you come across a reminder that brings it home to you so forcefully that you realise you’ve never left: Apartheid South Africa; State of Emergency South Africa; forced removal South Africa. This is at the centre of the extended set-piece that forms the heart of the first part of the movie – the long, chaotic sequence where the hired mercenaries and functionaries of MNU, the firm to which the government has outsourced the task of the ‘clean up’ of the ghetto, have their first encounter with the reluctant, soon-to-be-displaced Alien population. It is a cinematic tour de force; one of the most sustained and brilliant pieces of filmmaking I can recall seeing – but I wonder whether any of the movie’s international audience will even understand a fraction of what is going on here.
arts-district9-584

Forced removal, 21st-century style

As anyone who lived with any kind of political awareness through the eighteen years between 1976 and 1994 in South Africa will immediately see, what the film is doing here is to give you an almost obsessively focussed, insistently detailed account of the workings of the Apartheid state’s repressive apparatus as it existed during the regime’s most conflictual years. Apartheid repression was never just about violence. Instead, it was a strange and carefully composed mix of brutal force, racist anthropology, Foucauldian surveillance, and a curious, bureaucratic obsession with the appearance of due process and the rule of law. Every single thing you see in this scene – the harassed, edgy bureaucrats with their clipboards and their explanations; the ludicrous attempts to get the aliens to sign the consent forms prior to their removal to the tent town; the prowling military thugs; the constant threat of violence, spiralling out of control; the chaos and confusion – all of it is precisely how it all worked. Watching it, I suddenly remembered, with vertiginous clarity: Crossroads. KTC. The Witdoeke. Jeff Benzien. Dolf Odendaal. Some of you reading this blog – you were there too. You know of whom and of what I speak.
wikus-van-der-merwe

Wikus

What makes it brilliant cinema, of course – what makes it all come together as it does, is not just this accuracy; not even the disorienting, vertiginous, documentary-style way in which Blomkamp renders the almost-out-of-control chaos of the engagement. It is above all, the figure of Wikus van der Merwe, surely one of the most unlikely protagonists that cinema has produced in a long while. One of the high points of a pretty impressive performance on the part of the actor Sharlto Copley is his rendition of Wikus during the forced removal, half the time trying to control the whole mad show, and half the time acting as a kind of crazed, geeky curator, speed-talking at the camera and describing in awful English every aspect of what is going on.

The whole point of Wikus, of course, is that he is such a prat. He is thick as a plank. He is awful. He is as unlike a Bruce Willis or a Samuel Jackson as it is possible to be – and this is at least partly because he is Afrikaans. He is not just Afrikaans, he is a rockspider. He is a doos, a chop, a moegoe. He mangles English with hilarious ineptness. He is cringe-makingly uncool: cheesily in love with his ‘angel’ wife, dorkily clumsy in front of the camera, cravenly obedient to authority, crudely bullying to the aliens that he deals with, and horrifyingly inept in his dealings with his Black underlings, whom he patronizes with cheery ignorance. At the same time, in his earnestness, in his desire to be liked, in his bright-eyed and bushy-tailed eagerness to make a success of this impossible, chaotic, disaster of a job, one cannot but like him.

At one level, the character of Wikus allows the movie to have a huge amount of satirical fun with the stupidity and ignorance of his outlook and what he represents, for of course Wikus’s exasperated encounters with angry, uncomprehending, resistant aliens precisely mimic and pillory the carryings-on Apartheid officialdom at its crude and idiotic worst. One of the funniest standing jokes in the movie is Wikus’s relationship with the alien whom he refers to throughout the film as Christopher Johnson. (‘I cannot do the clicks’). From time to time Wikus will stop, fix the camera with his glowing eyes, and start talking about what ‘the Prawn’ needs; what ‘the Prawn’ should do. That was precisely t way in which Apartheid officials used to pontificate about the nature of ‘the Black man’ or ‘the Bantu.’

‘Christopher Johnson.’

But this not all that is going on. For all of its attention to historical echoes, District 9 is not simply an allegory about forced removals, and the aliens in the movie are not black South Africans in disguise. Rather, what is happening here is something altogether more significant and ambitious: the metaphors and tropes of science fiction are being used to engage rather more deeply and disconcertingly with the nature of racism itself – with the way that racist ideology and discourse deals with the feared, hated, despised (and desired!) ‘Other.’

This is the heart of the film. In many ways the most disturbing and unsettling aspect of the movie is the rendition of the aliens themselves, who appear like nothing so much as huge, quasi-human cockroaches. They are ‘prawns’, they are ‘bottom feeders’, they appear to be addicted to giant tins of blue cat food; they live on rubbish dumps, they breed. They are disgusting. And that is the point. For - if I may be allowed to wax academic for a bit – the figures of the aliens are, in a sense, nothing other than the exaggerated, concrete rendering of the way in which racist discourse depicts its objects: the way Nazism talked about ‘the Jew’ and Apartheid ideology talked about ‘Coloureds’; the way present-day white racists in Europe (and black and white xenophobes down here!) talk about immigrants; the way Radio Interahamwe talked about Tutsis. By presenting the aliens to us, not as attractive, noble creatures, by making them half-human and half insect, the film constantly trips us up by making the racist gaze our gaze. It confronts us with our complicity with racism, by making us identify with the perspective of the racist, inviting us to feel the revulsion of the xenophobe – and then pulling the carpet from under our feet.

It is this tension that produces what must be the most toe-curlingly awful moment in the film – the scene where Wikus and his men stumble across the breeding house where the alien grubs are feeding on the decomposing body of a cow, and proceed to torch the place. The shack is in flames; from its interior a gruesome series of popping noises is heard; Wikus speaks delightedly to the camera, stammering in his excitement as he explains that that sound is the noise of the ‘little fellows’ exploding like popcorn. On the one hand, we in the audience share his delighted revulsion in the cleansing of that awful, insectile, maggoty interior – and at the same time, we are disconcertingly aware that we are witnessing a scene of genocide. The film will spare us nothing.

Rather more subtly – but perhaps more disturbingly - the same logic is at play in the film’s treatment of the reviled ‘Nigerians’, who are depicted in much the same fantastical ‘othering’ way as the aliens themselves. Like the aliens, the Nigerians are rendered as surrealistically horrendous; in fact part of their awfulness is that they live so close to the aliens, doing business with them, even (or so some of the whites in the film fantasize) having sex with them. And no wonder. For in the racist world view, the most terrible thing about the relation with the Other is that the boundary might break down – that ‘they’ might become like ‘us’, or we like ‘them’.

district-9-wikus-alienAnd that, of course, is Wikus’s fate.

It is here that the movie’s location in the genre of science fiction becomes so crucial. For the modern-day science fiction notion of the alien is arguably one of the ways in which the West can imagine and re-imagine its encounters with those it colonised and racialised. Part of the fascination of the science- fictional notion of the alien is that it allows us to imagine an encounter with an ‘other’ that is both like and entirely unlike us – and who therefore brings the thrilling possibility that ‘they’ might do to ‘us’ what ‘we,’ the whites, the Northerners, have done to blacks, to Indians, to ‘natives’ on so many places of own world. ‘Take us to your leader’ says the tall ambiguous figure… And then? Do they come in peace? Are they wise? Do they bring technology or miraculous medicine? Do they invite us to join an interstellar commonwealth of worlds? Or do they eviscerate us, turn us into slaves, eat our children, take our land?

This is what makes Wikus’s journey so wrenching and profound. The compelling and mysterious thing about the aliens in District 9 is the deep ambiguity that they represent. Are they a culture of superbeings, more advanced than us? Their spaceship, looming hugely over Johannesburg, seems to suggest that. Or are they cockroaches; depraved, subhuman, corrupt; so decayed that even with all their weaponry they are nothing but victims? That question hangs over the whole movie – and nowhere more disquietingly than when Wikus realises that he is physically turning into an alien. What does this transformation mean? At one level, it is a fall into death, it is the body rotting: teeth falling out, nails dropping off, the white skin flaking, sliming, growing black scales. But it also brings with it a strange promise: the possibility of a different relationship with the aliens – and of course, the ability to manipulate all that awesome weaponry.

clawdistrict-9-01All this comes together in one of the most inspired moments of the whole film. Wikus and the alien ‘Christopher Johnson’ are in the bowels of the MNU building. They have secured the vial of fluid that they need to effect their escape plan. They are in a firefight: the scene is indescribably chaotic, with junk and destroyed equipment scattered all around, gunshots, bullets flying everywhere. A moment ago, horrifyingly, they stumbled across the lab where the MNU has been torturing and conducting medical experiments uponthe aliens. Wikus protests his innocence – I did not know this was happening, he says – but his protests sound feeble and unconvincing even to us. By now we are used to anthropomorphising ‘Christopher’, and we can see the horror and the pity – and the rage – that we imagine flowing through him as he looks at the ravaged body of his murdered kin. We can see that he would be entirely within his rights to smear Wikus then and there, and go his own way. But he runs across the passage to join him, and together they crouch behind a bulkhead, the room filling with smoke and the thunder of gunshots, firing madly round corners, covering each other as they dash down the passage. And suddenly we are watching … a buddy movie. I thought it was the most thrilling moment in the whole film- not because of the excitement of the action, but because the panache and the knowingness with which the movie draws upon – and re-invents – the genres within which it operates. There are many movies in which the aliens are good guys – but never aliens that look like this. Wikus has crossed over to the other side. And so have we. For the rest of the film, we will look at the humans with fear and distrust, and when the mercenary Kobus Venter finally gets his gruesome come-uppance – he is torn apart alive, eviscerated and eaten by a group of aliens – the audience cheers.

So Wikus at last becomes a man: by ceasing to be one. In the final desparate battle of the film, clad in a giant alien exoskeleton that disintegrates around him, he has has nothing left but his courage. We don’t know whether he will ever find his way back to the human side of the fence again. The last scene shows him, completely transformed into an alien now, crouching among the rubble and debris of the ghetto, fashioning a flower out of scrap metal and tin cans. It is a beautiful image – and ever so slightly cheesy. But that’s Wikus for you. You can take the alien out of Benoni, but you can’t take Benoni out of the alien. Strangely enough, we know that Wikus is now more at home on this blasted, fractured landscape than he has ever been in his life.

So, a strange and disturbing film; disorienting and discombobulating at more than one level. It is thoroughly and utterly South African, but it inhabits its post-human cyborg sci-fi imaginary with knowing Northern familiarity. It is clearly intended to comment and question on racism and xenophobia (it started life as a short movie questioning South African attitudes to, among others, those dreaded Nigerians) but it gets its effects through forcing you, the viewer, time and time again, to be the racist. It is affectionately patriotic, but it frames its local and regional content by consistently ridiculing it. It crackles with life and energy, but the landscape is the landscape of death: decayed, raddled, crumbing, strewn with garbage . The moments of beauty in the film are the lingering shots of shantytown filth, settling gently in the breeze. Above all, it is resolutely non-serious. This is where the film stands head and shoulders above most other attempts to say something about our past. At last we have a film that is not pompous, does not moralise, does not offer lessons. It does not attempt to be blameless. Instead, it parades its own crudeness. This is South Africa, it says. A great place, as I said earlier this week, for trauma. This is how awful we are. This is what we are like. Could you live here?

There’s one last inversion. One of the most abiding images in the film is of the alien spaceship: huge, threatening, enigmatic, hanging over the Joburg skyline. It is ominous, brooding (hanging there like the future, says one friend of mine; like the mines under the surface of the city, says another). And it looks so right that next time I am at OR Tambo international airport, I know that I will reflexively look up to see if it is still there. But the continual presence of the ship forces one more question. Who is it who arrived, uninvited, in South Africa? Who is it who came one day in a ship, and stayed, and did not leave? In Johannesburg: who are the aliens?

this review first appeared on asubtleknife

“and i was also thinking of that film “black little heart”, why it kind of offended me so much, drove me to defense mode…but i understand it more, from a distance…
that closing imagery i did actually find beautiful, but i wanted to deny it, to reject it - i just couldn’t go that far, that deep into self-hatred, it irritated me, but that final imagery gave me a look into what the heroin does for the junky, it visually captured the beautiful feeling of escape from the horror of the absence of love.”

Gabisile Ndebele

Hit movie accused of depicting Nigerians as cruel savages

X-MEN: Wolverine actor Hakeem Kae-Kazim has blasted South African-made blockbuster District9 for being xenophobic.

Kae-Kazim, British but of Nigerian origin, said on his profile on social networking website Facebook that he was “appalled at the depiction of Nigerians in the hit movie District 9”.

The Hotel Rwanda and Pirates of the Caribbean actor saw the film last week in Los Angeles.

“The continuing demonstration of our brothers and sisters [who only appeared as prostitutes for the aliens] will make them feel it justifies their [prostitution] actions.

“The demonstration of Nigerians truly made me and others question what is truly going on with the true liberation of the African.”

Directed by Neil Blomkamp and produced by the Lord of the Rings trilogy’s Peter Jackson, the film is about a bureaucrat assigned to evict and move alien s stranded on E arth from one government refugee camp to another in Johannesburg.

The Racialicious blog owner Carmen van Kerckhove, president and co-founder of US diversity education company New Demographic, said: “The Nigerians have a wailing ‘witch doctor’ who instructs them to eat the aliens. And they do it. Bloody, wriggling, and raw, of course. We’re told that the black prostitutes ‘service’ the aliens sexually,” she wrote.

“… Yup, that’s Hollywood’s Africa, isn’t it? Black Africans shown as degenerate savages who’ll have sex with non-humans and eat people. Disgusting.”

Kae-Kazim dramatically added: “Oh, South Africa! What would Steven Biko say?”

this article first appeared on the times

District 9 probes our country’s history in a novel way but in doing so does it trivialise the past? Mary Corrigall speaks to the film’s creator and cast

A spaceship looming over Joburg’s characteristic skyline is an incongruent and unexpected sight. It is an image that local cinemagoers are unlikely ever to forget.

Not just because an extraterrestrial invasion of Joburg is far-fetched or even because we tend to associate such staple science-fiction scenes with Hollywood products, but because this (mostly) home-grown cinematic product heralds a new era in South African film-making. Foremost, District 9 is a visual spectacle like no other. It feeds at the intersection between the imagination, history and popular culture, giving rise to a truly transcultural hybrid product. Further contributing to District 9’s hybrid character is the fact that Neill Blomkamp, the writer and director, has employed a heady mix of genres to narrate his unusual tale; from sci-fi and mockumentary to action-drama, with a heavy political subtext thrown into the mix, Blomkamp has produced a film that is tricky to pigeonhole. Consequently, it presents a peculiar visual and ideological aesthetic that breaks out of any established cinematic mould, making it the first of its kind.

Because it draws from so many familiar film genres, it has broad appeal; action lovers to academics will all be titillated by Blomkamp’s sci-fi spectacle. It is likely, therefore, to be the first bona fide South African blockbuster - Leon Shuster’s record will finally be broken - thereby ushering in a new epoch in homegrown cinema.

But, most important, it is the first local film that probes our dark and tempestuous past and present in such a unique manner. And this is where the sci-fi impulses in the film come into play: all the fantastical or otherworldly features create distance. Thus segregation, violence and prejudice play out in an alternative reality to our own, althoughthe setting and earthly characters are eerily familiar. In this way, South Africans will be able to view their culture from an objective standpoint - a perspective that has escaped our cultural producers thus far. But are we ready to view our history from such a position, particularly when it comes packaged in a satirical action drama tailor-made for American viewers? Does the sci-fi angle only serve to trivialise apartheid?

By employing a sci-fi idiom, Blomkamp does fix his audience in a remote position that evinces our society’s proclivity for violence and prejudice, which manifests or is amplified whenever it is presented with an unknowable Other. Here, of course, the outsiders come in the form of aliens or “Prawns” - the sobriquet that the Joburgers assign to this crustacean-like population that come to seek refuge in their city when a malfunction occurs with their spaceship.

The “Prawns” couldn’t have picked a worse place for a breakdown: they are summarily rounded up and dumped in a township called District 9. Here they lead an impoverished existence, forced to scour rubbish dumps for nourishment and objects to build shelters. And if this isn’t bad enough they must also contend with Multinational United’s (MNU) heavy-handed forces. MNU is a private defence contractor that the government has engaged to deal with the relocation of the “Prawns” to another locale, where they will be more closely monitored and isolated from mainstream society.

Joburgers support their removal: documentary footage confirms their resentment of these alien beings who are thought to present a threat.

Echoes of swart gevaar (black danger) loom large, as do other phenomena that characterised the apartheid era, such as forced removals, segregation and a reckless if not immoral disregard for others - baby “Prawns” are heartlessly exterminated by the MNU.

Completing the apartheid analogy are a host of South African archetypes such as the central character, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), assigned as head of the operation to resettle the aliens in a camp on the outskirts of Joburg.

Van der Merwe is a stereotypical Afrikaans bureaucrat drawn from the apartheid era: his buffoonery and apparent happy-go-lucky attitude belie a persona capable of carrying out acts of extreme violence and cruelty. But as his actions are sanctioned by the state and the multinational he works for, he does not question the nature or effects of his actions. That is, until he finds himself wearing the other shoe and he comes to truly grasp and empathise with the plight of the “Prawns”.

Wikus undergoes a physical metamorphosis, but it is his psychological transformation that promises redemption for the white Afrikaner. His change of attitude and willingness to help liberate the “Prawns” mirrors the political about-turn that occurred in the country before the 1994 elections.

“I am glad that I got to play an Afrikaner with a redemptive quality, because I think Afrikaners have been labelled the bad guys for apartheid. The fact that they voted to change the system is very quickly overlooked by the rest of the world,” observes Copley.

In playing Van der Merwe, Copley says he was able to deal with some of the emotional baggage that comes with being a white South African. “It allowed me to process some of the various emotions that I have had. I have gone from feeling ashamed and guilty to feeling proud to feeling afraid that our country is going to turn into the next Zimbabwe.

“To go through all (of this) is a complicated set of emotions and so for me the film touches on some of those feelings. It has provided a sort of outlet. Because it has satire, you laugh about how ridiculous it all is.”

Of course, the satirical and humorous undertones in the film, which are mostly established through the mockumentary form of narration that characterises the early part of the film, might prompt some to question whether District 9 makes light of the country’s history and the xenophobia phenomenon, which its plot also recalls. Nevertheless, the victims - the Prawns - and their suffering are never mocked; it is Van der Merwe, who embodies the figure of the Afrikaner perpetrator, that is the target of Blomkamp’s satirical and cynical gaze.

There are moments of lightness, but largely the movie conjures a morbid world governed by power-hungry authorities who think little of the social cost of their greed. With the actions of the MDU recalling those of SANDF Special Forces, District 9 evokes bitter truths about South Africa’s history, albeit candy-coated in the sci-fi action idiom.

“The bad guys that Neill (Blomkamp) conjures are taken straight from our collective subconscious,” observes Jason Cope, who plays Christopher Johnson, the main alien, and a number of other aliens. “I felt there were times when I couldn’t breathe while watching the cops beating people. It was very intense. But it is like all those films where the big bad mobster or evil Nazi is portrayed in a candyfloss action movie. It’s a disturbing and terrible process but an interesting one because of that.”

Mandla Gaduka, who stars as Van der Merwe’s assistant, Fundiswa Mhlanga, was taken aback to see “aspects of our past portrayed in this way. It will be interesting to see how some people will view our past portrayed in such a way, with action and sci-fi aspects to it.”

Gaduka is also concerned the clicks in the aliens’ language “might be a sore point with some people”.

Blomkamp insists that he never set out to make a film that overtly dealt with his country’s political past. The inference is that Blomkamp’s imagination is a product of his provenance. Hailing from such a politicised environment, it was a given that this South African-born film-maker would imbue any story of his home town with a political subtext. Perhaps any representation of South African life is burdened by its history.

“I was trying not to beat people over the head with ‘this is Neill’s message’. The genetic experimentation stuff in the movie is like Wouter Basson and the SANDF influence. The character of Kobus (Venter) and the other mercenaries recalls the rise of private military companies in the 90s.

“The film deals with a whole bunch of topics that I think about. But I think you can choose how serious or not serious they are to the film because science-fiction gives you a veneer,” asserts Blomkamp.

Almost in contradiction to the sci-fi vocabulary, Blomkamp has employed a number of filmic devices to situate the drama in reality, such as real footage of ordinary Joburgers commenting on an alien presence in their city and the docu-mentary idiom which mediates the early parts of the film, relaying the history of the “Prawns” and how they came to be in Joburg. In this way Blomkamp’s fantasy is tinged with authenticity, which intensifies how one experiences the drama.

Blomkamp says he wanted to reinvent the sci-fi genre. “I am interested in all science fiction but I wanted to portray it as real, and the most real would be to make a full-on documentary about aliens arriving in Joburg, but the thing is that it would never make its money back.”

The short film Alive in Joburg was the genesis for the feature and in creating that work Blomkamp simply set out to infuse a documentary-style film on Joburg with sci-fi elements.

“Joburg came first - I was really interested in Joburg in the same way that I am interested in Palestine. One day I realised I can put sci-fi into that setting. Aliens arriving on earth is a staple of science fiction. In order to keep the city you have to bring a foreign element to give it that sci-fi twist. The movie is not a particularly revolutionary sci-fi film; the ships, the weapons and the aliens are all familiar. The unfamiliar parts are Africa, the inspiration comes from Joburg.”

Nevertheless, in casting Joburg as this den of inequity, or a supposedly dangerous and unforgiving African city which even advanced aliens aren’t able to conquer, Blomkamp follows in the footsteps of a number of South African films such as Jerusalema, Tsotsi and SMS Sugarman, which all infer that this illustrious city infects its inhabitants, spreading corruption, greed and violence. In this regard, Blomkamp’s film trades on established tropes.

The xenophobic attacks of 2008 are also overtly evoked - linguistically it is easy to make the leap from aliens to illegal aliens, but also the manner in which the aliens are ostracised and packed off to live in makeshift camps in the movie recalls events in Joburg and other parts of South Africa during strife between locals and refugees. Watching the extraterrestrials being given the same treatment, one can’t help feeling that District 9 engenders the notion that South African society remains locked in patterns that were set in the past and that different forms of prejudice are likely to play out over and over again.

As it happened, Blomkamp co-wrote the script with Terry Tatchell in 2007 - at least a year before xenophobic violence erupted across the country. At the time of the attacks, Blomkamp was prepping the film in Joburg. He grew concerned that his film would be misinterpreted.

“It meant that our script was putting forward the idea of black citizens wanting aliens out before it had become a serious problem. I worried that maybe it would seem insensitive or appear that we were poking fun at a topic that is so serious. But the flip side is that Alive in Joburg was obviously really touching on that powder-keg environment. At the time that I shot that short I didn’t think that things would turn to that, and now it seems it could happen again.”

Although Blomkamp was careful to be sensitive to the issue of prejudice against African nationals settled in South Africa, the character of Obasanjo (played by Eugene Khumbanyiwa), a Nigerian warlord who operates inside District 9, is a negative clichéd representation of a Nigerian. Not only is he cast as an unscrupulous criminal but all the pejorative notions about Africans are projected onto Obasanjo. He is reared on a diet of violence; after watching his parents butchered, he goes on to become a child soldier, tutored in rape and mayhem. A game of cricket played with grenades leaves him paralysed. He is corrupt, violent and power-hungry: an exaggerated African archetype.

“He doesn’t believe in the system; he believes in guns and weapons. He knows that once he can tap into the alien weapons he will have the power. He is emotionless,” suggests Khumbanyiwa.

In this way the film peddles an oversimplified view of Africans, which may account for its success abroad. A sci-fi film set in African certainly contributes towards an exotic quotient.

“Setting it in SA gives it that uniqueness; not a feeling of something being rehashed. It comes from outside that place. The idea was to put western science fiction in an unfamiliar setting. We have all seen aliens arriving in LA and this is odd. People like originality,” notes Blomkamp.

In appropriating a largely American idiom Blomkamp does poke a finger at the West, subverting the traditional one-way cultural dialogue between the centre and the periphery. Blomkamp and many of his cast believe the issues the film raises are universal.

“The body horror of metamorphosis is universal - so is segregation and racism,” observes Blomkamp.

“This movie makes people realise that racism doesn’t really exist, that it doesn’t have anything to do with what colour you are but to do with how different you are. We find it difficult to accept someone, anyone, who is different. In this case in District 9 the black people don’t like the aliens, the white people don’t like the aliens, so we segregate them. Why? Because we are unsure what they are all about. For me it is an interesting theme. It might make some people realise that a lot of unnecessary hate is not there because of race but because we are different, and teaches us to be more tolerant, ” suggests Vanessa Haywood, who plays Tania, Wikus’s wife.

“The movie does ask the question: is this human nature and how far have we come as human beings?” adds David James, who plays Kobus Venter, the renegade mercenary.

In its opening weekend in the US, District 9 grossed $37 million, proving its broad appeal. But as Carolynne Cunningham, one of the producers, observed: “The real test will be with South African audiences. Because it was made here it is important that it is liked here.”

Its political subtext could either prove to be its main attraction or its pitfall. Regardless of which direction public opinion goes, the iconic image of a spaceship settled over Joburg will remain a flashpoint in the history of South African cinema.

during 2006 South Africa won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for Tsotsi . Gavin Hood’s multi-award winning drama about a township gangster has been the climax of the South African New Wave that started in 2004 and to date resulted in more than 40 international awards for local features, documentaries and shorts. Sadly the non-renewal of a special feature film fund by the Department of Arts and Culture has stifled the South African New Wave and as a result feature film production has declined remarkably. As the most important national institution for the development and promotion of the South African film and video industry, the South African National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) currently needs about R325 million per year to do a proper job. Unfortunately its annual allocation is a mere R24 million with which it has to cover its administrative expenditure, as well as funding obligations. As a result of limited government funding many exciting new and veteran filmmakers have to rely on themselves to finalise projects.

In an interview with the academic Mayke Vermeren acclaimed film maker Darrell Roodt made the following pessimistic statement about the current state of South African cinema: “ Tsotsi is the end of the wave. I think South African film is finished now. It will sleep for the next ten years”. The reality is that some of the most significant films during the past year or more have been made without NFVF support. Winner of Best South African feature at the 2006 Apollo Film Festival Faith’s Corner is one example. The film follows the life of Faith, a homeless beggar and a single mother of two young sons. They live in an abandoned car in an alleyway of central Johannesburg. Faith spends her days begging for money from disinterested commuters on the streets. Darrell Roodt’s experimentation with film form is remarkable: Shot in the style of the silent cinema, complete with intertitles to capture the dialogue, the film sensitively confronts social issues of poverty and joblessness in South Africa. It is a vivid combination of social concern and formal experimentation. By using the silent format it almost makes a statement that social conditions for the poor haven’t changed over the decades. Several other award-winning features also received no NFVF funding: Khalo Matabane’s innovative blending of documentary and fiction in Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon deals with refugees and xenophobia. Gustav Kuhn’s Ouma se Slim Kind examines relationships during the 1940s and how the dominant Afrikaner culture at the time destroyed any hope of non-racialism. Winner of Best Feature at the 2007 Apollo Film Festival Son of Man is a refreshing retelling of the Gospels within the setting of a South African township. Zulfah Otto-Sallies explores conflict in a Muslim family in the neo-realist Don’t Touch . Darrell Roodt’s Meisie (Girl) is a slice of life about a girl in a rural community that is prevented to school by her dad who believes that she should spend her days tending goats instead. Shot in the style of neorealism the film features wonderful natural performances by non-professional actors from the remote community of Riemvasmaak, on the edge of the Kalahari. Sadly, the funding crisis impacts on our most acclaimed directors. Ross Devenish, who received international awards for The Guest and Marigolds in August , has been in a constant struggle since his return to South Africa in 2002 to finalise new film projects. His script based on a novel by Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying , has been rejected twice by the NFVF. Devenish’s second project, Nothing but the Truth , based on actor John Kani’s play, has thus far met with even more problems. The film deals with the relationship between those black South Africans who stayed behind during the apartheid struggle and those who went into exile. After many problems regarding funding the film has been completed – but Devenish has removed his name from the film’s credits.

In the current financial climate auteur directors such as Dumisani Phakati (Waiting for Valdez ), Tebogo Mahlatsi, Aryan Kaganof (Western 4.33) and Garth Meyer (Bitter Water ) are struggling to create innovative work. Sadly the talent among young film makers is there, but financial constraints are a major challenge. If Devenish struggles one could imagine the challenges faced by a new generation of young voices. In last year’s NFVF report the former chair of the Council, Mfundi Vundla, stated that the institution has failed a new generation of filmmakers. He admit to “Failing outstanding directing talent such as Tebogo Mahlatsi, Thabang Moleya, Zola Maseko, Catherine Stewart, Dumisani Phakathi, Revel Fox, and Khalo Matabane and many others in not granting them maximum opportunities to sharpen their skills and thereby position our country as a film producing and exporting country.” Some of these voices such as Tebogo Mahlatsi and Garth Meyer have brilliantly explored oral narrative structures in their recent short films. They are following in the tradition of great African masters such as Ousmane Sembene and Med Hondo, who rejected the classical narrative structure. For decades South African filmmakers and scriptwriters were isolated from the developments in cinemas elsewhere on the African continent. While we are celebrating the genius of Sembene this year one hopes that scriptwriting training programmes such as SEDIBA and the various funding agencies will be flexible to allow orality in narrative structures by our South African storytellers.. For decades the South African film industry existed in isolation while, especially from the 1950s to the 1980s, world cinema enjoyed a revival, with innovative films made in Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Asian countries. The revival continues, with world cinema probably being at its most exciting at present, a creative flux from which we’re excluded because of the nature of our commercial distribution patterns and an overemphasis on Hollywood films in our multiplexes. It seems that among local distributors and some funders, the Hollywood-style, commercial film is preferred. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, the industry has seen much change and development. The newly elected government recognised the potential role that cinema could play in democratic transformation and decided to set up a number of economic incentives and government bodies to foster the growth of the local industry. The success of a number of South African productions on the international market has encouraged the signing of a number of international co-production treaties. However, despite governmental and international support, the majority of South African filmmakers are still struggling to cover basic production costs and many films fail to reach their intended audience. The reasons behind these economic / distribution difficulties are highly complex and the resultant impact on the creative self-expression of filmmakers is most significant. It is a fragile industry, especially in the face of globalisation.

this article first appeared here

Fragmented, incidentally distorted and vital, Shot Down is not only a remarkable (as in “What the Fuck!”) cinematic achievement, it is also a searing insight into the mind of the artistic white liberal in the last high years of Apartheid.

It’s 1986 and Paul Gilliat is coaxed back from a career in New York, shooting footage of visiting Third World musicians, to his hometown of Johannesburg to shoot a film about banned black playwright Rasechaba. It is all a front however; Gilliat is really employed by the National Bureaucratic government to assassinate the man accused of spreading dissent. Gilliat attempts to contact his target through his old friends who are all dissenting artists and musicians (James Phillips, I say nothing else). Film maker Andrew Worsdale uses this device to show clips and portions of then contempory white protest theater and film. I say white because Shot Down is primarily about how ineffective art is as a protest tool, while itself is acting as a conduit for that art of protest and itself being the very thing whose intentions it seems to skewer. But more than that it serves through this cutting up, to show how fragmented the liberal white man’s psychological burden must have been at the time.

The nuances of Shot Down’s point of view are highlighted when Bella (Irene Stephanou) talking seemingly to no one, proclaims “I’m sorry I’m White”. Bella is not literally saying what is on her mind, she is practicing a sketch from a political “cabaret”. Is she really sorry? Is she playing the part of someone who is sorry? Is her character a true reflection of herself? Is portraying white guilt as a way to drive a larger point home within the confines of the “cabaret”. These are questions that, satisfyingly, Worsdale never attempts to answer. Therein lies the brilliance of Shot Down. It illustrates a worldview by being totally part of it, but it never stoops to explain nor offer answers in any traditional sense.

When Gilliat finally gets out of the headspace of protest artists and on the road to find Rasechaba the film settles into a different pace. Our hero sets out to kill in confusion and then settles into to a slow searching for answers, in this regard Shot Down almost functions as a Apocalypse Now in reverse, but it’s invested with a lot less portentous rambling and a lot more absurdity. A key scene is Gilliat, James Phillips and Caesar (A Young Barker Heyns, um, I mean, Robert Whitehead) sitting in their car at a roadhouse (How do you tell it’s still the eighties? A drive-in non-franchise burger joint called Casablanca) watching a guy in another car shout at his girlfriend and then them for watching. It highlights all the intricacies of the relationship without anyone really working at it.

Shot Down is the truest of white protest films, it capture the confusion of being white, knowing things aren’t right and being ill equipped to deal with it, all in a gloriously off hand manner. When Gilliat makes an impassioned plea to the go-betweens about the importance of people seeing Rasechaba’s theater, he is told “Our theatre has no meaning to anyone else but ourselves, do you think there is any point in showing it to you?” Never has the well-meaning white liberal dilemma been illustrated more succinctly. And it’s the closest he ever comes to finding or understanding his target.

On film festival release in 1987 (before it was banned for having ‘ no artistic merit whatsoever’) Ivor Powell called it “the archetypal, white, decadent, existential-crisis-ridden, drug-crazed, politically incorrect, misanthropic film.” These words still stand today even though twenty-two years on, Shot Down is hard to find. If you want to see it, there are occasional screenings at WITS. You could try mailing PaulGilliat@telkomsa.net; he’s a pal of the screenwriter Rick Shaw and may be able to get you a copy. Or you could phone M-Net (they have the rights) but that will probably be as effective as Gilliat’s resignation phone call to his bureaucratic handlers. He was answered by a machine.

Side note: Shot Down has some amazing music in it. The Cherry Faced Lurchers, Benny-B Funk, Kalahari Surfer, Bernoldus Niemand and The Genuines.

this review first appeared on mahala.co.za