Andrew Worsdale
Switzerland has more banks than dentists. This is one of the trivia I picked up a fortnight ago when I joined a group of fellow South African film-makers to attend the Black Movie Film Festival in Geneva. Strangely, most of the participants where white.
I hauled myself there with my old staple Shot Down along with Jim Bailey (head of the Bailey Archives), Tim Greene (Corner Caffie), Marie Human (curator of the Drum exhibition), Khalo Matebane (Chikin Bizniss), Carsten Rasch (Eating Fish), Trevor- Steele Taylor (film festival programmer) and Lindy Wilson (Cape Town-based film- maker). The selection of movies was peculiar, to say the least. There was no Cry, The Beloved Country or Sarafina but an eccentric selection of short films alongside movies like Come Back Africa and The Penny Whistle Boys.
Katharina Von Flotow, director of the festival, worked on various museum projects in Benin, Cameroon and Ethiopia before becoming a film-maker herself and starting the festival in 1991. Since then she has showcased films ranging from ethnography to West African classics to the sprouting black independents from Britain and the United States.
She was amazed at the style of South African film-making. “Your films are absolutely different,” she says. “No person in West Africa has made films that show how culture can be. You guys are making films that are about yourselves. You are pretty tough. Other African films are far more pleasant – they deal with Africanness like Rousseau, the noble savage and all that. They don’t deal with what it’s actually like living in Dakar or Lagos and I think that’s distinctive about South African cinema.”
Day One found us at a lakeside restaurant and sauna where Trevor, Khalo, Carsten and myself found a dreadlocked, hash-smoking DJ who called himself Amadou. He gave us the low-down on Geneva: “It’s all about money and sex.” The one-street red-light district showed little promise and anyway, by the end of the week we were all scrambling for bucks. Hell, a plat du jour or a pizza can set you back over R100.
On opening night one of the organisers spoke at the Drum exhibition, promising to be short and to the point. She wasn’t, and babbled on about Africans having rhythm and music being our greatest cultural export … Many of us wondered whether she’d even read the programme or actually seen a South African movie.
The next day Tim Greene got adventurous, rented a motorbike and set out for France, trekking two hours out of Geneva to buy a Lomo camera – a state- of-the-art Soviet still camera that is masterful in low light and dinky enough to sit unnoticed in your jeans.
I was less daring but did send a fax to Jean-Luc Godard, imploring him to come and see my movie. He didn’t pitch, or if he did it was in heavy disguise. Through a South African friend we all met up with a wonderful Genevan eccentric, the Baron, and his exquisite companion who we named the Baroness. Heavy-duty drinkers and cocaine addicts, they gave us a whirlwind and debonair introduction to the city.
The highlight of the Baron’s hospitality was a visit to the Universal – a decadent bar- cum-restaurant run by a local artist. There I was introduced to a home-made alcoholic concoction named “Brent”, after the North Sea oil rig. Severely sweet, it was made of lashings of vodka laced with crme de menthe.
On Friday we ventured to visit the flea-market. I bought a hat. Trevor hit a bargain and found four strange videos, most of them quasi-erotic. One title I remember was Prisoner of War Camp for Young Asian Girls. He was in his element; Carsten got himself a bondage magazine and Khalo and I were miserable.
Saturday came and we all introduced our movies. Khalo, the only darkie, was the source of much amour. His film – the M-Net short Chikin Bizniss – was a sell-out success and at a party in a local squat (Geneva has over 150 squats) he was the toast of the evening. The party was for a good cause. The squatters had saved over R100 000 in “rent” over the past 10 years and were donating some money to a local school, some to a small hospital in Ethiopia, some to feed themselves and the rest to the local independent newspaper La Courriere.
So it was a kind of boys’ own holiday – most of the important deals were made between ourselves. The best attended of the festival events were the short films, and an impeccable lecture/demonstration by Lindy Wilson about the coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. That was delivered in the same week that French Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon was jailed for 10 years.
It seems that South African cinema has been branded “tough and uncompromising”. I suppose we had to go all the way to cuckoo-clock land to find that out.
Our visit was also distinctive because previous guests had just wanted to get laid by white women. (We weren’t all that different, though. Most of us had seen each other’s films so much of our time was spent hanging around trying to get laid – without success.)