A new film on Cape Town’s homeless people takes the viewer on ‘a moral obstacle race’. Lauren Shantal reports
‘My name is Yvonne and I drink wine. And I like to smoke dagga.” When the mic is wrested from the compere and the evening begins with an assertion like this, you know that decorum and middle-class sensibilities have no place here, in the burstingly full Observatory Recreation Hall.
This is hardly an unruly Alcholics Anonymous meeting, but rather an unruly meeting of bergies and non-bergies at the world premiere of Franois Verster’s film about Cape Town’s homeless people, Pavement Aristocrats. Its stars – the lords and ladies of the street, the prodigal children of the Mother City – have stolen the evening in mock Hollywood style, quite literally in fact.
The film (“jou ma se documentary”?) was introduced amid roars of laughter, a few impromptu take-overs from wannabe MCs, several shouted demands for food during the city manager’s opening speech, and an utterly heart-rending account of loss from a man whose wife had just died.
The event was sponsored by the Big Issue – a rags-to-relative-riches mag sold by the homeless and unemployed. The film itself was funded partly by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, partly through loans, but mostly through sheer sweat on the part of producer and director Verster, who went without a salary for seven months to bring the documentary to this unusual audience.
The film will be screened at South Africa House in London later this year and will be broadcast on SABC3 early next year. It has been sold to Finland YRE TV2 and is being screened at several international markets. It has also been selected for the 18th Amiens International Film Festival.
The hour-long documentary marks a significant debut for Verster in his first serious solo venture. It goes beyond the stereotype, he says, to try and establish “an awareness of the historical depth underlying these supposedly funny drunken people”.
Through a series of interviews with an historian and social workers, the film traces the bergie community back to their Khoisan roots, outlines colonial dispossession, and exposes the modern-day alcohol dependency deliberately set up by the tot system used on the Cape’s wine farms.
But it also gives the community a chance to tell their story, adds Verster. It does so by zooming in on the daily life of two couples, highlighting their inimitable wit in the face of despair, their weakness, and in the end, the dignity of choice that allows them to survive.
According to community worker Rob Amato, who was interviewed in the film, watching it is like running “an obligatory moral obstacle race”. I would agree, but it is a race that appears to have no finish line. The subject matter, although sometimes humorous, is wracked with pathos.
Pavement Aristocrats constitutes an important, sensitively filmed attempt to raise awareness about and humanise a largely demonised community. Big Issue project coordinator Shane Halpin believes that “bridges have to be built between communities. Homeless people suffer also because they are alienated, and a first step in assisting this community is to make ordinary citizens aware of their plight and thereby to change often very negative perceptions.”
The film does that, and more. It is testimony to its strength that although very few of the privileged who packed Obs hall stayed on at the DJ party afterwards to get down with the down-and-out, some did.