Hopes are high for a gradual rebirth of a South African film industry, writes Andrew Worsdale
‘Every year I seem to feel the film industry surging with renewed optimism, yet nothing seems to happen. It’s all a state of foreplay with no penetration. well, now I can finally say — or predict — that the foreplay has resulted a state of erectile excitement.
The past year has seen remarkable steps forward for local film and television production; 1997 has seen vital groundwork in laying a foundation for a viable film future. And most industry players agree, or fervently hope, that by the millennium we will have a self-supporting local movie industry producing quality product that international audiences want to see.
The Independent Producer’s Organisation (IPO), which has been around for slightly more than a year, has made some very important headway to consolidate a local industry — lobbying parliament; helping devise the film foundation bill; making submissions to the Independent Broadcasting Authority about amendments to M-Net’s licence; and delivering papers on local content at the recent conference held in Durban.
IPO chair Mfundi Vundla says: “It’s been a very good year for the IPO and the industry in general. Everyone’s very upbeat about the future. I’m really optimistic that within two or three years, with all these new partnerships like Primedia and African Media Entertainment [AME], there’ll be a real emergence of new film in this country.”
Broadcasting deregulation is on its way and a new free-to-air TV channel is to be licensed in March, so media consortiums have been rising rapidly. Primedia and AME have become the first companies investing heavily in film, and TV production to be listed on the JSE.
Earlier in the year Primedia bought Ster-Kinekor for R1,6-billion and is embarking on a plan for local production, while AME, which bought Penguin Films, is a consortium made up of similar film production companies and entertainment ventures.
Director of AME David Dison, who has had years of experience in the industry as a lawyer, working on projects ranging from Canon schlock to anti-apartheid documentaries, says the company is “a platform for creative talent. one of our aims is to tell ordinary stories about ordinary South Africans. These apartheid-driven stories are old hat.”
Producer David Heitner who heads AME’s film division is very excited about the new opportunities emerging. “The mindset of the status quo, from distributors to broadcasters, is changing with this more competitive environment,” he says. “You have to look at these developments in a wider context. we’re part of the world economy now so we have to tell stories that can travel. “
Jason Xenopolous, Primedia’s entertainment director, agrees. he was recently quoted in the Financial Mail as saying: “There will be demand for high-quality local content. Television and cinema are becoming increasingly parochial. The secret is to produce parochial (or niche) content that can travel. In this way it will be possible to enter into co-production deals with international companies.”
One of the first steps towards that was the signing of a co-production agreement with Canada at the recent film and TV market in Cape Town, initiated by the South African-Canadian TV series, Molo Fish.
Neville Singh, director of film at the department of arts, Culture, Science and Technology says: “Between November 1996 and November this year — between the two film markets — we have carried out a whole array of activities to boost the industry, principally the film fund and promotion of the industry internationally.”
With R10-million allocated to projects ranging from script development to documentary and feature production, and a further amount to be doled out early next year, the government is firmly behind a viable local movie industry that has led to the renewed vigour among producers.
Despite all this lobbying and corporate creation, the product on the ground has been sparse, although noticeably up on last year. M-Net took the lead, producing Sexy Girls, the story of a gang of coloured girls who abduct a na=EFve white businessman, and Letting Go, an inter-racial love story. It co-financed Fools, Ramedan Suleman’s award-winning directorial debut, and it is currently in pre-production on Chicken Bizness, a feature based on the award-winning New directions short.
In line with this expansive investment in films, the pay channel has diversified and set up a new production arm called Magicworks that aims to produce feature films and dramas with African appeal.
Evidence of M-Net’s commitment is that it picked up the television rights for The Ghost at the Window at this year’s market. Shot by 26-year-old Robert Benjamin on a tiny budget culled from his own savings, the supernatural drama has been described as “totally cinematic”.
The other low-budget coup of the year has to be Lenny, the movie biography of famous drag queen Granny Lee, who started life as a poor coloured schoolteacher, moved to Johannesburg and, with the help of excessive medication and alcohol, turned white overnight. Director Nico Steyn shot the film in under two weeks on a budget of just over R20 000, and managed to enlist the help of some of the country’s top actors including Sandra Prinsloo, Sean Taylor and Edwin van Wyk (who plays Lee), to perform on deferrals.
Steyn’s sheer tenacity is a great testament to the fact that local film-makers are just going out there and doing it. The days of tax shelters and crappy Ninja-type junk seem to be over. Even Danny Lerner of Nu Metro, whose company regularly produce two or three Cyber Cops or Delta Forces a year for the United States video market, admitted that they are developing several more “quality” projects that will have South African themes.
Anant Singh, who spearheaded local film-making with Darrell Roodt’s A Place of Weeping more than 10 years ago, has moved further afield, co-producing many of his pictures with the BBC. One of these was Bravo Two Zero, the Iraq/SAS action movie that starred Sean Bean. But Singh still showed confidence in local content by financing Katinka Heyns’s Paljas, a small-town tale about a malcontent family rescued by a circus clown. He ought to be praised for his first investment in an Afrikaans feature film. No doubt he’s plugging some kind of “art-house” experience, and the movie has been accepted as a nominee for best foreign film at 1998’s Academy Awards.
The industry is buoyant so one can only hope that we can create the kind of icons, the hype and marketing that makes the United States dominate movie screens. Jeremy Nathan of Catalyst Films, which co-produced Les Blair’s Jump the Gun, the United Kingdom-financed Jo’burg movie, and is a consultant for Primedia’s film arm, says: “I’m looking forward to looking back but with all this year’s progress it’s now up to all the players — the government, distributors, broadcasters and producers — to live up to this promise. We are standing on the precipice of possibility.”
Regarding the future, most producers I spoke to believe South Africans will start making films that are less politically self-conscious and reflect ordinary, homespun stories.
Perhaps the best example of the local movie world’s new-found confidence is the recent reaction to this buoyancy in a statement from the Motion Picture Association of America, the United States film-industry lobby, which said that it opposes the IBA rulings on local content and is concerned about video piracy in South Africa. It was quoted thus: “The association opposes discriminatory broadcast quotas and is particularly concerned that the South African broadcast quota for private broadcasters may become more restrictive.”
That’s to the Yankees, of course, and they can go fuck themselves. All local players seem to be on a roll for a film and Tv industry that’s heading high and possibly keeping American trash at bay. Roll on, I say!
Africa Dreaming eight-part, co-production across the continent and heralds, produced by Jeremy Nathan and heralds great promise for local African-based content.
South Africans have always tended to undermine our own capabilities, thinking anything from overseas is better. Now we’re taking control of our cultural identity, so film and television product must, and will, reflect that.