William Pretorius
ALLOW children to make their own films and you won’t get Mary Poppins, as producer Brent Quinn discovered when he workshopped scripts with groups of children from Hillbrow, Lenasia, Eldorado Park and Soweto. The results form the project Developing Visions, part of the South African International Film Festival.
The children were chosen from a variety of schools, narrowed down to four groups. Quinn’s role was “facilitator”, providing technical help. Everything, he says, is the “kids’ own work, done from their own point of view”.
On the first day on set at Barnato Park High in Hillbrow, they’re filming in the courtyard; says Quinn: “This is chaos”. Two schoolchildren sit at a table and talk; the boy has a black eye and a plaster on his forehead which, minutes before, was applied by the make-up department.
I ask someone nearby if the boy had a scrap, perhaps with the school bully. He looks at me with a smile reserved for the nave: “No. These stories are different.”
Different, indeed. When Quinn and his directors, Charity Mohlamme, Charmaine Zwane and Malizole Poni, are able to get together for a moment later, one learns just how realistic the four scripts are. “They’re based on issues in the kids’ communities,” explains Quinn.
The Hillbrow story, It’s Not On!, deals with a scholar who witnesses a crime in the school’s computer room and the gansters threaten to rape his girlfriend. A tough gangster movie? No, a relevant moral fable dealing with honesty, theft and having the courage of one’s convictions in the most adverse circumstances.
The Soweto group’s film, Fatal Abuse, is about child abuse. A girl whose father has abused her catches him abusing her younger brother. She threatens to kill her father, the beginning of an intense moral conflict. “This is social realism,” says Quinn. “In South Africa one in six children is sexually abused.”
In Gatvol, the Eldorado Park group tackles gangsterism in the story of two friends who clash over leadership. The film is about peer pressure and gangsterism — how gangs can become “home” to children — as well as the futilty of combating violence with violence.
The Lenasia story, Against the Odds, is about “cross-cultural love”, says Quinn. A young Hindu boy and a Muslim girl fall in love. They become victims of parental pressure and are banned from seeing each other. The conflict is between traditional values, personal desire and social and religious responsibility.
As Quinn suggests: “How often do we get a kid’s point of view, or listen to what they have to say and learn from them?” Adults mostly do it for children, and then we give them fairy stories — adult views of children.
The four films will be premiered at a gala event at the South African International Film Festival on October 12