South African Koto Bolofo has been picking up awards on the international festival circuit, so why have we never heard of him? Dinah Arnott finds out
`SOME 30 years ago, a history teacher was accused of communist infiltration: a quotation from Karl Marx had been found in one of his text books. This was criminal under the Bantu education system set up by the apartheid government. So he fled away …
“After Mandela was elected to presidency he returned in 1994 to find his people, his rights and what was remaining of his past. His family house had been destroyed, his father’s land confiscated, only to discover his abandoned car — and wandering around the car, the history teacher starts to remember.”
So reads the hand-written synopsis of The Land is White, The Seed is Black, in a little booklet scattered among the stalls of the seventh Sunny Side of the Doc International Documentary Market held annually in Marseille in the south of France. Along with two others, I found myself there setting up the South African stand. After two months of frenzied activity we had collected about 20 films and projects in progress from independent producers willing to test how they would fare in an international arena.
Catapulted into early summer, Pernod and the heady atmosphere of an international event, we were surprised to find a South African contender in the International Documentary Film Festival held alongside the market.
Rushing to the screening, we were greeted with 16mm black and white low-angle shots of an old man circling a wreck of a car to the strains of Danny Boy. Any resemblance to the standard “returning exile” scenario ended there.
Koto Bolofo, setting foot in South Africa for the first time since his childhood, decided to film his father’s return after 24 years as an expatriate in Britain. The poignant story of his departure into exile is offset by a set of quirky sequences depicting village life, complete with overtly stylised “village gossip” voice-overs.
Moving images are intercut with stills. The presence of the camera is repeatedly acknowledged, belying the neutrality of the documentary form. Children running through a field suddenly face the camera, hold up a clapperboard, and then repeat the process.
Excited by this unusual depiction of an all-too- familiar story, we invited Bolofo to our stand. And accompanied by his wife, he arrived, overflowing with humour and enthusiasm.
The spirit of Bolofo’s father upon his return, “so cool, so laid back”, without bitterness or anger, is what inspired the making of the film. “The film, for me, was like a contribution — telling people simply, elegantly and in a dignified, poetic way what the past of a simple man like my father was about.
“I’ve seen so many films on Southern Africa in Europe, done by Europeans, that say: `We blame the whites, they did this to us.’ They’re very graphic, very black and white. They’re easy to understand. My film was just to say that a certain injustice has been done, but there’s a way to tell somebody so that we can communicate with one another,” explained Koto.
Molotof Film Cocktail, the French co-producers, had jumped at the mention of South Africa, but Bolofo warned them they were not going to get the usual thing: “The films we tend to see, living in the West, show demonstrations, people being shot. They’re all very `one plus one equals two’. They never have films where people have to think with their hearts. With The Land is White, The Seed is Black, I wanted to find a way to tell a simple story more from the heart than the mind.”
In Bolofo’s search for this “new approach to tell a story”, the most important thing was an “elegance of how to tell of an injustice that was done in the past”. In the film the emotional reactions of pity or blame are undercut by the irreverent tone. The slightly uncomfortable spectator wonders if this is grotesque caricature, irony or just simple story- telling — calling into question the certainty with which filmmakers traditionally represent South Africa.
“Sadly, South Africa falls into the trap of an industry way of making films, a cliche. They tend to say: `That is how the big films are in the West, we must mimic them.’ I find there are very few films that express their own truth.”
Being educated in Europe and then returning home was “terrifying”. Subjected to critical scrutiny and hostile silences as he travelled with his wife, who is white, he felt not much had changed.
Could he ever live here? Bolofo says: “When I go there, the country starts to hurt me. It starts to go inside me. So I have to take a step back to make a film like this. I need a neutral country to see from … It’s a very fine line, what I’m trying to project towards South Africa. I’ve seen many films about South Africa, documentaries, big movies, and the fine line is not there. I’m not convinced by what I see.”
Paradoxically, through distancing himself, Bolofo reaches into the heart of the matter. At the end of the festival in Marseille, his film was awarded the Images of Culture prize.
That The Land is White, The Seed is Black was snapped up by the Berlin film festival, among a host of others, is, to the film-maker, proof that when the uniquely South African flavour is put down on film, it will sell.