For the festival is, to use the words of its founder, Nodi Murphy, “in bones-of-arse mode”. Staff have taken pay cuts of between 20% and 40% and Murphy would rather receive than make calls.
Still, “we have enough to fund April”, she says, meaning the mini-festival starting on April 12 and running until April 21 at the usual Nu Metro venues (Hyde Park in Johannesburg and the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town).
The festival, formerly a big annual event, has already been reformulated in recent years to spread itself over the year, coming in several instalments. This has helped it survive and festivalgoers end up actually seeing more of the movies.
Murphy sums it up as “less choice but more choice films”.
A funding crunch is one of the problems faced by OIA. Another, according to Murphy, is the increasing use of torrents to find and obtain non-mainstream movies. If cinephiles, including gay and lesbian cinephiles, can now download for free the movies they would usually see at the festival, they are not likely to go, are they?
Murphy declaims this syllogism with schoolteacherly firmness. “All festivals have been hit by torrenting,” she says. “It’s about access and everyone wants it now.”
As for whether OIA can survive, she admits: “The future is not certain. But we have plans. We have to regroup.”
Alternative funding channels
Alternative channels of funding have been sought, including the National Lottery. That body has had problems of its own, though, and has taken two years to get back to OIA on its proposal. “There’s a lot of pressure on one pot of money,” says Murphy of lottery funds, “and people put in very high bids.” OIA has already set up the 8 333 group to help fund the festival: if 8 333 people donated R240 each a year, the festival would have just under R2-million in its pocket. Murphy repeats this all to me, noting as she does so that she is very tired of giving this little sales pitch, having done it so often, but will keep giving it as long as she has to.
The festival has not yet reached 1 000 donors through this method, and it is still building its arrangement with Woolworths, by which you can join the chain’s My Village/My Planet initiative and a few cents of each purchase will go to the festival. OIA has already moved into DVD sales and is busy investigating broadcast deals.
“It’s so important to have a festival, to have a public presence,” says Murphy. “It’s community-building.” OIA has done an enormous amount of work, in fact, building queer South African filmmaking: “22 short films!” crows Murphy, which is, indeed, an achievement, as is the travelling around the festival has done to places that do not often get a lesbian or gay film festival. Not just Potch, either.
And what of the movies showing at this April’s festival? I, of course, liked most (of those I’ve seen) the ultra-arty post-modern Interior. Leather Bar, a sort of meditation on a gay club scene that was legendarily cut from the 1980 Al Pacino movie Cruising. Murphy particularly recommends Tomboy, about gender issues in children, and raves about the documentary How to Survive a Plague. “That,” she snorts, “is the kind of activism we need in South Africa.”
Go to oia.co.za for more, including movie info and screening times