Andrew Worsdale Pick of the festivals
Film festivals are frustrating because you find yourself inundated with movies, rushing from one to the next until they all become a confusing mess. The Cape Town International Film Festival opens this week, and with more than 50 movies on show, cinephiles can glut themselves to celluloid near-death.
James Polley, who passed away earlier this year, initiated the festival and directed it for 21 years. It became the country’s leading film carnival, featuring visitors like Werner Herzog and Nicolas Roeg. The festival has been through lean years with Polley’s illness and a lack of finances – it costs more than R250 000 to stage. But Polley found a worthy successor in erstwhile festival co-ordinator Trevor Steele-Taylor.
Says Steele-Taylor: “It’s a festival where any film has the potential to be art.” The result is a superb mix of art, experimentation, mainstream, politics and kink. Here are my picks of the event.
South African-born Ian Kerkhof, who lives in Amsterdam, has made wild arty movies like The Boy Who Masturbated Himself to a Climax and Confessions of a Yeoville Rapist. He is controversial, but his movies are beautiful and intensely involving. He is represented by three films at the festival. His feature, Shabondama Elegy, was made in Japan in collaboration with “pink movie” (Japanese porn) producer Suzuki Akihiro. The film revolves around a Dutch gangster who works for the Yakuza and betrays them. While on the run he meets a Japanese girl and an intense, obsessive, sexual and even masochistic relationship follows. It has only been screened previously at the Rotterdam and Berlin festivals – considerable kudos for Cape Town.
Kinky Kerkhof also has two documentaries on show. Beyond Ultra Violence is about a Japanese artist who is captivated by seppaku (ritual suicide), while Sylvia Kristel – Years Later examines the star of the 1974 French soft-core movie Emmanuelle. Rumour has it Kerkhof is planning on a new Emmanuelle with the star, so she can’t have gone to seed.
After years of censorship wrangles and copyright problems, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel’s landmark 1970 Performance will play for the first time in South Africa. It’s a virtuoso act which balances reality and fantasy within the boundaries of a thriller. James Fox plays a gangster on the run who takes refuge with a bi-sexual rock singer played by Mick Jagger. The first half is plain genre, but the film slowly develops into a kaleidoscope of complex visuals egged on by drug-taking and sexual ambivalence.
The other classic on show (which, like Performance was one of Polley’s favourite films) is If …, Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film. Made at the time of the Parisian student revolt, the picture takes place at an English public school where Mick Travers (Malcolm McDowell) takes on the bureaucratic order of the system. It borrows directly from Jean Vigo’s 1933 masterpiece, Zero de Conduite (Zero for Conduct).
Acclaimed Czech film-maker Juraj Jakubisco, who was a personal friend of Polley, will be a guest of the festival with his wife, Deana Jakubiscova. They’ll be holding seminars and screening several of their films, including An Ambiguous Report About the End of the World. The film begins with a scene of a man carrying the body of a woman to the edge of a cliff in a snowy mountain pass, then placing a rifle under his chin and killing himself. It goes into flashback and a complex story ensues that includes a wedding banquet raided by a pack of wolves. It may sound grim, but the film is filled with elements of comic humanity and great characters that give tremendous force to the tragic story.
Cape Town has formed a relationship with the Gteborg Film Festival and six Swedish films will be playing. Lukas Moodyson’s directorial debut Fucking Amal (Amal is a town) is the most successful Swedish movie of all time. Maj Wechselmann’s Brave Women Speak About Apartheid, a brilliant documentary that seems more like a feature film, follows the lives of 25 women who spoke out and fought against the regime. It’s one of the most impressive struggle films ever made.
The British Council, who with the Cape Metropolitan Council are major sponsors of the festival, has an impressive selection of United Kingdom movies on show. Genevieve Joliffe is screening her low-budget Urban Ghost Story, which is about a Glasgow girl who has an accident while on ecstasy. She’s dead for 180 seconds and when she’s revived is convinced that something latched on to her.
There are so many highlights that you could get celluloid indigestion. South African director Richard Stanley’s dazzling low- budget sci-fi flick Hardware as well as his cut of the muti-murder movie Dust Devil is on show, as is Darrell Roodt’s drug thriller Dangerous Ground.
For Gautengers the Greek Film Centre and the Greek Consulate General are hosting a retrospective of master Greek film-maker Theo Angelopoulos. Eternity and a Day, which won the Ecumenical Prize at Cannes, is a rich philosophical film about existential questions. The Bee-Keeper, which features an astonishing performance from Marcello Mastroianni, is a beautifully made observation of a middle-aged man who quits his job, leaves his wife and goes on a journey with his beehives. Landscape in the Mist features a brother and sister who go on the road in search of their missing father.
With this deluge of great movies, I recommend Cape Town for transgressive stuff and Johannesburg for serious, sombre cinema.