TELEVISION: Andrew Worsdale
All you film-makers out there! Dust off those old video-cassettes and film reels ‘ the SABC might buy them. The three-part series Matchbox City plays on SABC3 at 9.45pm on Sunday December 22.
Matchbox City was initiated in 1990 by left-wing group Free Filmmakers as a hands-on training project for its stable of independent film-makers and actors. Among them were many familiar names and faces: producer Angus Gibson, lead actor Ramolao Makhene and other stalwarts from the Junction Avenue Theatre Company like Patrick Shai, Arthur Molepo, Roger Smith and Michelle Rowe.
Free Filmmakers aimed, in the late Eighties heyday of political idealism, to develop a social-realist soap opera modelled on Brazilian and Mozambican series. Three short films were made as a pilot for a series on a low budget.
Each episode can be viewed separately or as a whole and Matchbox City is a unique example of the idealism in socio-political film-making circles during an uncertain and fractious time. It was workshopped over a couple of months and is an occasionally stilted yet fairly successful melding of social-political issues and personal melodrama.
The central character throughout the trilogy is Madi ‘ a former MK commander, played forcefully by Makhene. He returns to South Africa after 14 years and finds a country in transition, with many social problems. The first episode, entitled The Family, follows Madi as he tries to adapt to township life. Major sources of conflict are the cramped conditions, his inability to find a job and his disrupted family, troubled by violence.
Filmed in 1991, it has many nostalgic references, including close-ups of R5 notes and TV speeches by FW De Klerk. The series’ strength is the way it connects the conflicts between social and political ills without signposting issues. However, the first film scuppers that narrative integrity to a degree; there are too many theatrically staged scenes with lingering master shots.
The second episode ‘ Swimming Pools for Soweto (Award-winner at the 1990 Weekly Mail Film Festival) and the third ‘ Sugartown (Winner of Best Short Drama at the 1991 Weekly Mail Film Festival) ‘ are considerably more successful cinematically.
As always, Makhene is riveting. He’s an actor who possesses magnificent stage presence and in all his film roles manages to exude the slow-burning presence demanded of television and cinema. It’s ironic that many of the participants, including Makhene, had no idea the series was being screened. When I asked Angus Gibson about the series he said, ‘I’m slightly embarrassed actually, I mean I haven’t watched them for eight or 10 years. They have some nice things and some terrible things but I still admire the spirit of those films, and from the present vantage point I think we should make the space for that kind of collaborative work again.’