Just the suggestion of producing an Afrikaans film with an all-white cast in South Africa in 1998 is enough to make a boardroom of grown businessmen burst into uncontollable laughter.
“Nee hartjie,” said the men in suits to film-maker Katinka Heyns when she was doing the circuit to find financial backers for her latest project, Paljas. “not if it’s all-white. It doesn’t matter how good it is if we don’t get a return on our investment.” Same old story.
By the time producer Anant Singh had entered the picture and finance for Paljas was lined up, even Heyns’s husband, Chris Barnard, the author of Paljas, had had enough. “He says that’s it. It’s just too much pressure. I can’t see us working on another film together any time soon. He’s a novelist, he wants to write another novel,” says Heyns, decked out in white, sipping herb tea on the balcony of her spacious Sonneblom Studios outside Johannesburg.
“Especially near the end when a R3,5- million backer pulled out with six weeks to go … I had to decide if I still wanted to make this film or if I was going to stay at home … ” It is estimated that Paljas eventually cost in the region of R4-million to produce, bringing home that old cliché that R4-million is about what Steven Spielberg spends on an elaborate title sequence.
“My back was against the wall. I couldn’t stop thinking how difficult it must have been for black film-makers trying to work under apartheid. I always thought I had a sense of geregtigheid [justice] and that I understood, but I never realised. It’s a terrible feeling.”
At the end of the day, no matter what your opinion of Paljas, you have to admire the tenacity it took to see the project realised.
Of course, it has not always been such a titanic struggle to produce an Afrikaans film in South Africa. There was a time, before the advent of television in 1975, that the industry was churning out a good dozen Afrikaans features a year, spurred on by tax-break incentives and government subsidies. It was during this “golden era” that Heyns emerged as one of the foremost actors of her generation.
Moving from the stage, Heyns surfed the “new wave” of Sixties cinema. She began to seek work in film to make time for her family and is today one of precious few South African women to direct feature films in South Africa. Make that one of precious few South Africans to direct feature films in South Africa.
“Ten years ago I would never have dreamed of touching an Afrikaans project,” says Cry, the Beloved Country and Sarafina producer Singh from Durban this week. “But I had the script translated and saw it was really very good. Look, the bottom line is that the political transformation in South Africa is why I supported Paljas.”
While much is being made of the fact that the film was selected by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology as our official entry for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, it is also true that Paljas is really the only local feature made for theatrical release in the past year. Unless, of course, you count Kaalgat Tussen die Daisies. But the artiness levels of Kaalgat make Rambo seem like a surrealist classic.
“We wanted to make an Afrikaans film with integrity,” says Singh. And Paljas is, in every sense of the term, an “art film”, lyrical and poetic. Sure it’s sentimental, but it is also highly accomplished – beautifully filmed and edited and and surprisingly well-acted.
Even so, Singh was initially so nervous of the language that Heyns had to shoot an English version as well. After a slightly dismal screening at Cannes and a decision to cut the film by half an hour, everyone involved is thrilled with the subtitled version.
Watching a special screening of Paljas in an abandoned preview cinema this week, it occurred to me that it is in fact the language that makes Paljas. You try and say “Wee’ jy daai kind is so mal soos ‘n hoender” with any conviction in English. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Paljas makes it through to the five Oscar finalists in part because of the curiosity value of a language with such a turbulent history.
If it’s to be regarded as a sign of the times that “the language of the oppressor” can cut it as a national treasure, then we are finally getting beyond the politically correct barrier in local film. On the other hand, as Heyns puts it, “I don’t know why Afrikaans is seen as oppressive. Coloured people speak Afrikaans. It’s not the language that committed the sins … Also, it’s a test for a master marketer like Anant. “
“It’s a universal story; these are problems that could face any country,” says Singh. Yet in many ways, Paljas is a particularly South African film. Although slightly fantastic and irrefutably romanticised, Paljas has a lot to offer as a political film about the Afrikaner, even though it dwells on the past.
The film is set in 1969 in a town called Toorwater in the Klein Karoo. It’s not made up, Toorwater (Magic Water) actually exists. And in Toorwater in 1969 there was no black community, just a coloured community, and coloureds were banned from the church, the only location used in Paljas outside of a railway house. Heyns was not going to compromise and cast black actors when none were needed to tell her tale, regardless of the criticism.
It’s the kind of independent streak that keeps me chatting to her on the balcony until early evening. Time and time again she uses the word “frequency” – as in energy flow, bliss, fate and the paths that we choose. Katinka Heyns is a spiritual creature who believes in the shifting new age, in the rejuvenation of youth, in belief rather than religion and in the failing power of the patriarch. Her film is very her.
In Toorwater lives the MacDonald family, posted to the furthest outpost a railway- working, poor-white family can find itself. A cloud hangs over the MacDonalds; the marriage is frayed and little Willem hasn’t spoken a word in two years. Everything changes when a circus gets trapped in the town, inflaming local xenophobia and leaving behind a clown called Manuel. Manuel befriends Willem, who captures the paljas (magic that can heal). A showdown ensues and, although Heyns deplores violence in film, the last half hour of the movie is brutally confrontational.
It speaks of a community strengthened by the church yet isolated by fear, having to accept the unknown into their lives. And once they do, there is no turning back. “This,” says Heyns, as the setting sun begins to darken our view of Johannesburg, “is a story of how the Afrikaner never listened. Or he listened but never heard, until he was isolated, eventually placed in limbo and cut off, getting smaller and smaller. He found himself in a place where he was poor – emotionally and spiritually.
“And then a miracle happened. Not De Klerk releasing Mandela – it was too late for that – but an energy, a power, an indication of new life … It’s the same energy that is found in nature and that is leading us into the next millennium. Mandela came like a paljas, carrying this energy. But it takes the new generation to take it forward. In the film, it is a child that believes first, and then the others …”