Janet Smith speaks to the first South African writer/director to have a short film accepted for screening by Ster-Kinekor
Gavin Hood was an accidental hero when he took on his first (and only) pin-up role in The Game, the South African rugby soap which was slightly ahead of its time when it was screened in the early 1990s. Zane Meas played his friend, his rival, his confidant in that huge hit – and the men came to represent the ideals of some of the boys of their generation.
It was a useful device, a rugby soap, for TV1’s transformational drama czars who recognised the source of identification it would provide for some viewers. Today, Lisenethini – Gomolemo Mokae’s promising soccer drama which breaks into a sweat on SABC1 this month – would have the stronger pop-culture currency.
At the time, Hood was perfect for the role of the white sports star caught in an emotional scrum. Privately, he was quite different. A lawyer who trained at the University of the Witwatersrand, he was also the son of a very wealthy and famous father, yet never exploited his surname. He was well-known in the industry for being a confident but nice guy who wanted to effect change in what we saw on television.
Today, Hood has moved away from acting, following the swift trajectory of his performance in The Game, to writer/director in 22 Regent East – a small TV drama about twentysomethings at war with the disappointments of their society – and now writer/director of The Storekeeper, the first South African short film to be accepted by Ster-Kinekor for screening at its art-film outlet, Cinema Nouveau (formerly -and, for that matter, still -known as the Rosebank Mall). Meas, meanwhile, was one of the stars of SABC1’s hit sitcom Jo’burg Blues, which recently ended its first season on that channel.
They don’t see each other anymore.
For the past couple of years, Hood has been drumming up interest abroad in South African film. Now based in London, he seems to have transformed himself into a canny business operator who admits he wants to advance his own career in film-making but who also believes that individual achievements in financing national work can only help to expand the industry at home.
Hood hopes The Storekeeper will operate like his cinematic storefront in attracting attention from serious investors for bigger projects.
Now in his early 30s and talking very much like a lawyer, Hood was determined to first bring in the money for short film, a category that has gained in significance since the success of independent film festivals like Robert Redford’s Sundance in the United States and competitions like South Africa’s New Directions, initiated by M-Net.
Joining the queue of South African film-makers who can’t seem to lure financiers inside the country was not Hood’s style. If he couldn’t draw money at home, he would play his cards elsewhere.
”It mirrors an escalating crime situation in a micro way,” he says of The Storekeeper. ”It’s set somewhere in rural South Africa where a shop owner who has suffered a series of burglaries finally buys a shotgun, effectively taking the law into his own hands.”
To those who are bored and disturbed by the preoccupation with crime, the premise sounds tedious, over-explored, ill-timed.
Yet critics have generally been impressed, not so much by the plot per se, but by the look of the film, its direction and its cast with Winston Ntshona in the lead. Hood was not prepared to slide into what some say is a long, dirty tunnel, using American names as a way of getting his film to see the light of day.
The cast of The Storekeeper is 90% black and features a powerful South African soundtrack including performances by Miriam Makeba and the Imilonji ka’Ntu Choir.
Perhaps the tedium with anecdotal conversations on crime has enjoyed something of a transformation in The Storekeeper. Perhaps not.
Hood says the defiance of human dignity under threat is what he hopes has appealed to a local audience. In building a story around the aftermath of violence (The Storekeeper naturally has a tragedy at its core), he says he hopes those who’ve seen it will examine what it is inside themselves that encourages profound feelings of aggression.
”I think we’re in danger of responding to violence with violence,” he says. ”The film shows that the lines are sometimes easily blurred as people arm themselves to protect themselves in a sort of vigilante justice system, a kangaroo court justice system where we’re even capable to taking some kind of pleasure in revenge.”
The Storekeeper is a morality tale of sorts which inspired Hood to take on some social and psychological causes of our angst – and to try to approach them without stereotyping us as a paranoid nation.
”I wasn’t trying to make a small John Woo movie,” he says, ”but I do think we need to see ourselves as honestly as possible, which is why this film doesn’t go gently around the results of violence. It’s pretty tough. I have very rooted emotions in South Africa, and I wanted to examine the effects of violence on South Africans like me.”
He says he is now more convinced than ever that South African cinema can introduce the world to another multiculture in the same way that, say, Woo has taken Hong Kong to moviegoers around the planet.
The violence is not what the two directors have in common. Rather, it’s a good feeling that people everywhere have a certain curiosity about each other which is often best explored through entertainment of the most gutsy kind.
The Storekeeper continues to perform well at Cinema Nouveau, where it is expected to run until the end of April. It could yet seduce distributors abroad, and help Hood to realise his next dream: making a feature film in South Africa about South Africa.
Perhaps he’ll offer Meas a leading role.