ANDREW WORSDALE speaks with Zimbabwean director Ingrid Sinclair on the eve of the South African premiere of her award-winning film Flame
THIS time last year Zimbabwe-based film- maker Ingrid Sinclair was on her way to the premiere of her first feature, Flame, on the Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes film festival. This year she is in Johannesburg to promote the local opening.
It’s an unprecedented local release of an African film: eight prints, supplied by new distributors Africa Film Artists, who aim to build new audiences through quality releases from African directors. Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Kini and Adams, starring locals John Kani and Vusi Kunene, is next; meanwhile Sinclair’s chronicle of women guerrillas in Zimbabwe’s liberation war is proving phenomenally successful around the globe.
It’s won awards at Carthage, Amiens, M- Net’s All Africa Awards and scooped Best Actress, Best Director and the OAU Special Award for Best Film at the Southern African Film Festival in Harare. Just the other week it won Best Film at the prestigious Nestor Almendros International Human Rights Film Festival and in its first week on release in Harare it grossed Z$200 000, knocking actioners like Broken Arrow off the playing field. That’s no mean feat for a mainly donor-funded, politically sensitive movie that, although covering a mass of history both political and personal, was shot fast and furiously on the meagre budget of Z$1,2-million.
The narrative follows two girls, Florence and Nyasha, on a journey to the liberation camps in Mozambique, where they take the names Flame and Liberty, and begin training. Flame falls in and out of love with charismatic leader Comrade Danger throughout the picture, which follows the sisters’ experiences to present-day Zimbabwe.
The film was dogged by controversy every step of the way. Despite the film-makers getting script clearance from Zimbabwe’s minister of information, the government seized sections of the film before its completion on the grounds that a rape scene was pornographic.
Then the Zimbabwe War Veterans Association demanded the film be banned as it portrayed women soldiers being raped by comrades. Sinclair’s feeling about the whole thing is that the veterans “maybe felt that the carpet had been taken from under them and there is a more glorious way to picture the war. But it wasn’t glamorous … Nobody gets what they want after a war … I concentrated on the day-to-day realities of war because small things are often the most poignant.”
Sinclair is a well-preserved, even cute, forty-something and despite her socio- political credentials, she’s amazingly light-hearted, politically correct without being nauseatingly boring, naughty, friendly and (dare one say) flirtatious. That’s probably why the movie works – because despite all the history, messages and issues, she kept her rein on the personal inside the political.
Born in Bristol, England, she studied English and medicine before turning to film. The first film she worked on was about transvestites. The first she directed, for Channel 4, was Harriet Vyse, a documentary about a trade unionist who also happened to be a hunchback dwarf. Her documentary work evidently served her well; Flame is not only a re-telling of history but is also filled with neat personal idiosyncrasies.
She first went to Zimbabwe to visit her brother, who was working for the Ministry of Water making a promotional film with her future husband, Simon Bright. “I remember,” she says with a charming smile, “Simon called me and implored: `you must come and see my film about boreholes!’ ” The experience was enlightening and Sinclair stayed in Zimbabwe. In fact, Bright is executive producer of Flame and they’ve made many documentaries together through their company Zimmedia.
“In England, at the time,” she explains, “we made films about hire purchase. And when I got to Zimbabwe I thought, `Shit, this is far more dramatic.’ If you’re a decent film-maker you’re always trying to illuminate people’s lives and I was far more interested in women who’ve got to walk 10km to fetch water than in ones who’re struggling to pay off their washing machine.”
One of their documentaries, Bird from Another World, a lyrical exploration of two Zimbabwean sculptors, was the project that brought Flame into being. At a festival in Switzerland, Sinclair used her per diems to travel the country trying to raise funds to develop the script. She came back with about Z$80 000.
Flame was conceived as a documentary but, says Sinclair, “Everyone I spoke to said `no one will ever say what we want to say … We’ve hidden this story for 10 years’ … and so I realised I wasn’t interested in potted history but rather a personal take on the war from the perspective of today’s Zimbabwe.” She interviewed past combatants and together with a writer, developed a script.
Of the controversy around Flame, Sinclair believes Zimbabwe is stuck in a conservative mire. Because Flame did bring issues like rape into the open, it suffered tremendous flak, but as Sinclair says: “Due to all the fuss, a lot of people went to see it. All the gossip gave it staying power. Eventually the commotion died down and people started getting into the real things the movie deals with. They empathised with the character and didn’t treat it as a political tract.”
Part of the reason the movie has won audiences’ hearts and minds is that it is filled with implacable integrity. “I saw The English Patient the other day,” says Sinclair, “and it’s heart just wasn’t in itself. It wasn’t actually filled with passion. All those emotional issues just became another run-of-the-mill story. Whereas I believe Flame is achingly true … it has real, convincing passion.”
Minus a few faults, a tad of cardboard acting and a few awkward dramatic scenes, Flame is undoubtedly a revelation for African film, the continent’s women film- makers and the task of retelling history with passion rather than plaintiveness that is so often the case with South African film and television.
Sinclair’s already busy on her next project – a feature set during Rwanda’s genocide that has received funding as a direct result of Flame’s success. And hopefully the film will score locally as audiences are tired of seeing American schlock on their screens. As Ster-Moribo’s marketing manager Stan Mogotsi says: “Our vision is to put African films on the screen. As for our sister-company Ster-Kinekor, their vision is to make money.”
Flame runs at Ster-Moribos from Friday May 2