Andrew Worsdale looks at two promising entrants to the Newcomers Competition at this year’s Film and TV Market Among the 26 entries to the Newcomers Competition at this year’s Film and Television Market are two movies made by first-time directors on wings and prayers. Brendan Pollecut and Zak Dakile are heavily in debt as a result of their cinematic aspirations.
Pollecut’s film is an elegantly shot 15- minute drama called Lock Up, which follows the misery of two teenage girls who take ecstasy and run out of water at a rave, where they are literally locked up and prevented from leaving.
Best known as an actor in the SABC teen series The Legend of the Hidden City, Pollecut was originally intending to go to film school but was discouraged by the exorbitant cost. Inspired by film-maker Robert Rodriguez, he decided to just go out and make a film. “I had acted in a Castle Lager beer commercial a couple of months before and had netted myself a small amount of money – enough to get something done. While all my friends were investing their money in townhouses and cars, I decided I’d put mine into a movie,” he says.
He decided against the kind of low-budget short where two people sit in a room chatting and with the help of friends and fellow actors managed to produce a picture that has tremendous production values.
The crew shot at a real rave at Newtown’s Carfax, which generously supplied the venue, and hence a load of free extras. Filmed on 16mm over a weekend by veteran DP Digby Young, the film has the air of an anti-drug movie even though Pollecut flatly denies this, saying the film is distinctly apolitical. “When you see images of raves and so on you only see the happy, cheery side, I just wanted to tell a little story that took another approach.”
Simple in construction, Lock Up has a blackly comic ending that makes you sit up and think hey, this guy’s got talent.
Equally talented is Zak Dakile, whose 52- minute film Pleeze Help No Food No Job is one of the most refreshing ironic tragedies I have seen, and earmarks the 21-year-old Voice of Soweto DJ as a future local cineaste of serious, albeit tongue-in- cheek, intent. The film begins in candid- camera style, with a guy begging outside the Rosebank Mall.
He teams up with a buddy and they end up hijacking a car and find there’s a baby on the back seat. They squabble and argue and pull guns on each other, the one eventually pressuring the other to shoot the infant. But he refuses and rescues the child while his buddy speeds off in the stolen car and is shot.
What ensues is a brilliantly witty examination of present-day gangsterism, with an ending that is breathtakingly funny.
The baby, who is dumped on a pavement near Baragwanath, ends up begging from hawkers and passersby. Now a white teenager, he speaks only Zulu and Sotho and ends up making a better living from the black community than our original beggar did in Rosebank.
What makes Dakile’s effort so refreshingly original is its cheeky off-the-cuff anecdotal style. He came up with the idea when he was a student at the South African School of Film, TV and Dramatic Art. Then he became a number-one DJ with his show The Ride Back Home on Voice of Soweto. When he had two weeks’ leave he took the opportunity to make the movie, begging and borrowing equipment and technical expertise from the Africa Growth Network that shares his company’s premises.
The two leadswere his friends and Dakile himself even makes an appearance as a raconteur, sitting on the loo recounting the bizarre events of the story. “There are lots of movies about gangsters or crime. I wanted this to be different,” Dakile, sporting bleached hair and hip lensless glasses, says. “The one guy who saves the baby is a reflection of how some people will accept change while others remain bitter.”
Dakile, who quit film school without telling his parents, says that they’re now really proud of him and despite the fact that he owes cast, crew and the network around R45 000, he’s hoping to do a deal with broadcasters at the upcoming film market.
He has two other projects in development, including a comedy-driven talk show about youth with Kwezi Hani and a short movie about taxi wars.
“People at film school just sit there and don’t do anything. They just dream about making movies. I figured that I should just go out there and make a movie, no matter how bad it is.”
Pleeze Help No Food No Job is pretty damn funny and pretty damn good. Both Pollecut and Dakile are hoping their first efforts may give them the leg-up to become more than emerging movie-makers and become the real thing. Pleeze help – no finance, no film!