Fools, the film based on the short stories of Njabulo Ndebele and directed by Ramadan Suleman, opens on circuit this week, Andrew Worsdale spoke to the director
Ramadan Suleman is a passionate guy. He uses his intense, piercing eyes when he talks and gesticulates powerfully. No wonder. He spent about 10 years in Paris and over coffee he is the veritable French auteur, having worked for renowned Francophone directors like Med Hondo and Suleman Cisse.
Suleman’s first feature film, Fools, based on the celebrated and Noma-award winning collection of short stories by Professor Njabulo Ndebele, opens in South Africa this week. After winning the Silver Leopard award for direction at the Locarno Film Festival, the movie has played in New York and Geneva to high acclaim and is still enjoying a long run in Paris, where it was released last September.
Foreigners seem to have lapped it up but I’m uncertain whether South African viewers have the maturity to deal with this rather difficult and uncompromising drama.
Fools is no easy “apartheid anger” bandwagon film. Rather it articulates the psychological terrain created during South Africa’s troubled past. But the film is a first for South African movies in that it is the first one to be directed by a black man. The budget of R4-million, most of which came from Europe, was topped up by the SABC, M-Net and the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology.
The film is set in Charteston township on Johannesburg’s East Rand and the plot involves a disgraced middle-aged schoolteacher (played by Patrick Shai) who is confronted by an 18-year-old activist whose sister he raped. The potentially melodramatic circumstances are treated with humanistic – some might even say nave – generosity.
Suleman says his movie is no easy propaganda piece.”I didn’t make the movie to please people,” he says, fiery eyes alight. “We live in a world of agreeing and disagreeing. Patrick’s character is a human being just like any other. Previously in `apartheid’ movies blacks were always passive hero/victims with whom you had to sympathise. Fools is not about devils and angels. After all, black people are full of contradictions.”
Suleman co-wrote the script with Bhekisizwe Peterson and they agree that the novella’s sparse tone helped give the movie poetic resonance.
Suleman, with Peterson, was one of the founder members of the Dhlomo theatre in Newtown, which in the early 1980s was a ground- breaking small theatre that showcased black playwrights and actors. At that time it was dubbed a “black consciousness” (BC) venue. He denies this. “People like to label. Many people are surprised that there are so few whites in Fools and so call it a BC movie, but whenever I listen to the radio or look at TV I think we’re going through this perestroika-type thing where no one knows what the fuck is going on. I believe it’s the artists who have to determine the route we as a nation have to take. It’s not the SABC and the bureaucrats who have to tell us how to show the rainbow story.”
His film showcases some great performances which were helped by Suleman’s background with theatre actors. Shai delivers probably the finest performance of his career and Suleman has surrounded him with a formidable force of talent. Vusi Kunene, who normally plays upright men with a social conscience, (Cry, the Beloved Country or SABC3’s Homeland) plays Mazambane, a township tsotsi – all wide- eyed and flamboyantly obnoxious as if he’s on crack. Ken Gampu was recruited to play one of the elders who has to decide on school- teacher Shai’s fate. Apparently Gampu said to the director: “I’m so proud that after 37 years of acting here’s a young man asking me to perform for him.”
Then he got Corney Mabaso to play Meneer Larumo, the school’s headmaster, a puppet of the Nationalist government. Mabaso is a veteran of the Dorkay House days and Suleman gave the actor footage of PW Botha and Lucas Mangope to watch in preparation for the role, so he is a mixture of deep seriousness and heavy repression.
In one scene an assembled school throng sings Die Stem as Mabaso waves them on. In this so-called “black” movie there’s no Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica. Suleman is ardent about his use of the one-time national anthem and the sakkie-sakkie sequence. “Why no Nkosi Sikelele? It’s like saying it’s a western and has to have the right ingredients. I think using that is like the film-maker looking for a PC pat on the back,” Suleman says. ” The use of Die Stem, as much as it may appear a mockery, is actually part of the ingrained seriousness of the time,” as Suleman says. “It was really a life and death thing.”
He is totally fired up with – dare I call it Gallic expression – when I ask him why he made a film about the past. “Fools is not just a movie about the past,” he says. ” But South Africans have to do mathematics. How much has really changed? I’m not pointing fingers but I’d like someone to come to the film with their wife or girlfriend and ask themselves how many `forgive mes’ there are in the township?” (He is referring to his allegorical township jester character who wanders throughout the picture with the constant cry of “Father forgive them.”
And that is part of the complexity of this movie. Fools is a mix of lyricism and extreme melodrama but it is very well handled. Suleman says he chose the story “because up until today I don’t think South African literature has moved forward. Ndebele’s book is not a book of slogans. Everyone knows we were oppressed but apartheid is a way of life. So okay, what’s next? How do you show people surviving these conditions. Patrick’s character in the film is a human being like any other. I mean, at the time of the French revolution there were probably 30-million people there but they weren’t all involved in storming the Bastille.”
His zeal is completely admirable but he is no brash young thing. “Okay, this is my first feature but I’m 43. I can’t be Orson Welles. South Africans in the industry have got to take risks. I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s all about education. I’m not preaching.”
On the subject of African cinema he is conscious that “European critics label African cinema as if it was from one country. It’s a continent of 54 countries with loads of different dialects. They’d never do the same thing in Europe. After all, Danish cinema has got nothing to do with British cinema.”
His point could well be taken to reflect South African cinema, where everyone is waiting for the so-called “great movie”. But we are also this multi-cultural polyglot of a nation and Fools ,as much as The Gods Must Be Crazy, reflects our nationhood.
Suleman’s next project is a one-minute piece for the United Nations. He was one of 30 directors chosen and is going to shoot it in South Africa and most of it will be 3-D and computerised imagery. I have no doubt that all the technology won’t get in the way of his innate humanity.