Ever been allowed into a movie for free and been allowed to drink beer and talk when you want to? Jean Barker visited Cape Town’s BioCafe
Beers are R3, entrance is free, and everyone is at the BioCafe on Wednesday evenings long before the short film screening starts, chatting and drinking. The chatting and drinking carries on all night.
“We want to create a fun atmosphere,” says Adam de Beer, head of the film school at City Varsity college. “Like a sports cafe – just with movies.”
Although the quality of the work is generally higher than what you’d see at a home video evening, the whole thing feels a bit like one. The closely packed and merry audience cheers when the actor sitting nervously next to them appears on the screen. They whisper “gross” and writhe in their seats when the special effects get nasty, or lose concentration and start talking when a film is self-indulgent. There’s none of the studious silence of a paying trendy audience trapped in iron maiden seats at a film festival.
“We force our students to screen everything they do. That way, they can hear everyone groan when it’s bad,” De Beer says.
Films that really bombed generally followed a similar theme of “young white man with girlfriend/mother/friends who don’t understand him tries to avoid joining the stream, is victimised and someone dies”. Made me long to go home and watch M*A*S*H* on DSTV.
A few excellent movies earned and received the audience’s full concentration – The Last Straw by director Benning Puren, Verboten Interdict by Billy Strange, Miss Elley and Nibbles and Duncan Angus’s The Manuscript. All shared one distinguishing feature: a plot.
The Last Straw is a viciously funny story. A man in a neck brace struggles to get a free straw at a station takeaway. But it’s only “one per customer” and as the proprietor puts it, “I make rule, not straws – capische?” Turns out, a little flexibility could have saved the proprietor’s life.
Verboten Interdict had viewers audibly squirming. A dreadlocked young man is woken up by the sound of German babbling, and cuts off his tongue in the belief that the sound is coming from his head. But the babbling continues, and the severed tongue keeps growing larger. When the man wakes up in the morning with blood on his pillow, he discovers a wrongly tuned radio next to his bed.
Okay – there’s the odd bit of camera noise. Sometimes the actors could be more carefully dressed for their roles and old people are played by 20-year-olds in make- up. But these people are using the resources they have, and the amount of acting, directing, production and writing talent on display makes me wonder why TV really is so bad, and why we’re buying most of it overseas.
In South Africa, where the real industry buzzword is “budget” and no community’s issues can be fairly ignored, this is the best thing I’ve seen since the exposure of Sarafina II.
The screenings take place every Wednesday at the BioCafe in Kloof Street, Cape Town. Happy Hour starts at 6.30, and the screenings begin around eight. Contact City Varsity on 423-3366 for details.