not PC
Andrew Worsdale
`I’m real pessimistic about the local film industry … and as for advertising and the commercials industry – that’s really siff, all these cocknoses with B Com degrees who think they can make movies, when all they want is to make money.”
So says Keren Labuschagne, outspoken perhaps, but tongue firmly in his ambitious cheek. At age 24 Labuschange has just graduated from Wits Drama School and recently won the Quantel/Questek student editing competition for his short film, Mind Grenades. His prize is a week’s training on “the mother of all digital editing machines” in Newbury, England – flights, accommodation, spending money, you name it.
Burning with enterprise, Labuschagne’s interest in movies and computers was born after he messed up his back playing rugby at Roosevelt High School. He enrolled for an accounting degree at Wits University but, after six months, transferred to drama where he spent most of his time working on student movies.
Of the four short films he’s made, two of them have science fiction or paranormal themes. “I saw Terminator over 62 times,” he says. His 10-minute fiction film, A Future Shift – written by fellow PC-geek, columnist and comedian Ian Fraser – follows a 1984- ish interrogation of a citizen by a security officer. Filmed on tape with bleached out colours and wide angle lenses it has a self-conscious studenty feel to it that’s hampered, Labuschagne acknowledges, by rather stiff performances. All the same, for a first film it’s quite impressive.
Even better though is Mind Grenade. A pseudo-sci-fi documentary, it’s an investigation into alien presences on earth. The 10-minute film comes up with the idea that buildings are “aerials” by which extra-terrestrial intelligence gathers information. Each cellphone call is monitored and the government knows it, but hides all knowledge.
“When I had to do a five-minute documentary project for university, I thought everyone would want to go into Soweto and do the poverty or the political thing. I’m more into the surreal. I’m a techno-geek, so I thought I’d make a fake science fiction documentary.”
Somewhere between video art and a Roswell-ish 60-Minutes insert, the film is shot on video (Super-VHS) and drained of most colour to give it a sepia effect. It has dazzling, speeded- up images of traffic jams, cellphone conversations and people working on computers. The interviews are all shot out of focus, lending an even more unreal feel to the piece.
Labuschagne is healthily cynical about South Africa’s so-called emerging cinematic talent: “The typical young film people here say: `Hey, we’re the new filmmakers and we know what to do and we’re doing things new’. Well I haven’t seen anything new,” he says going on to claim that “normally you can immediately see that something’s South African – it glares at you. My lecturer once asked me why can’t I make a South African movie.
“The truth is, I don’t think I could make a truly `ethno’ film. I just want to make a film that entertains and looks good. I don’t want to be stuck in 1978, and be all politically correct.”