A juvenile dressed as a coon sprints for the front door of a typical suburban house. The street is dark and empty. For a moment everything is quiet, except for the rumble of a car somewhere nearby. Then gunshots – loud – two flashes of light explode at a second-storey window. Seconds later the boy comes dancing out, runs at the camera, sneers and is gone.
So begins Shooting Bokkie, the brainchild of Rob de Mezieres and Adam Rist, based on a script by John Fredericks. It is what De Mezieres calls a ”mockumentary”, a semi-fictionalised documentary which reveals its subject by using the elements of narrative to make its point.
The Cape Flats and the gang life it has spawned have become a cliché. Films which attempt to tackle this subject are no exception. Often they’ll involve interviews with ex- or present gang members and can become quite didactic: gangsters will talk about how bad life is and how difficult it is to escape the dangerous life they lead – the simple message being that kids must stay away from gangs and lead good clean lives. But this ignores the complexity of their situation.
”The reality,” says De Mezieres, ”is that many of these kids are living in poverty. Go into their homes and you’ll see tin foil margarine covers which have been licked clean they’re so hungry. Then they see their friends wearing Nike trainers and Pepe jeans, eating greedily from KFC tubs, and all they have to do is work for the gangs to attain this kind of lifestyle.”
These juveniles are useful to the gangs because they cannot be prosecuted as adults, even if they commit adult crimes. The ”bokkies”, as they are called, do a gang’s dirty work, from drug deliveries to assassinations, and reap rich rewards for their efforts.
De Mezieres originally planned to make a full-length feature film taken from a script by John Fredericks called Yesterday’s Hero, which follows the life of a convict who wants to save his son from being sucked into gang life, starting off as a bokkie. But doing the film right required large amounts of cash which De Mezieres was having trouble getting hold of, a problem not unfamiliar to independent South African film-makers. So he decided to focus on a single aspect, the ”bokkie phenomenon”, and the theme for the film grew from that seed and the restrictions of a shoe-string budget.
Because there was no money, De Mezieres and Rist decided to create a film with no finesse; no art department, no pretty pictures, minimalistic lighting and no script. It would be completely spontaneous – the idea being to follow the bokkie as he worked.
The first thing they did was to film the crew being briefed about the project. No one was informed that the bokkie would be an actor and the killings staged. The only people who understood what was happening were the actor, Christo Davids, and the two producers.
Because it is done this way, the film is that much more convincing. The unstaged reactions of the crew, stunned and often enraged by the idea of making what they believe amounts to a snuff film, generates an atmosphere of reality and sets the tone of anxious tension which is retained throughout the film.
De Mezieres and Rist then set up filmed interviews with various Cape Town-based production companies. The reactions of the producers are the same as those of the crew and, quite obviously, Rist and De Mezieres are turned down.
The most poignant scene is set when the crew enter a gangster’s home, the idea ostensibly being to meet a bokkie who is prepared to be followed and filmed. The house they walk through is dingy and smoky, populated by kids sucking on white pipes (a combination of marijuana and mandrax) and getting drunk. The scene is punctuated by its gritty reality – once again no one, including the gangsters, is informed that the true bokkie will be an actor. As one of the crew says: ”For them it’s real – for you it’s something over there that you want to capture on film, but for them that’s real.”
The final scenes involve the actual assassinations and, although everything is staged, the frenetic activity of the hand-held camera, the scratchy film quality and a convincing, unscripted performance by Davids retain the sense of authenticity.
The film never preaches and is not overtly moralistic but a number of issues are raised, apart from the main theme. One of the crew, for example, raises the question of the camera’s objectivity: De Mezieres compares his idea to filming a killing in a wildlife documentary. One of the crew dismisses this, challenging the belief that the camera is able to distance itself from the events, pointing out that events are often controlled by the participation of the camera. Another questions the voyeuristic qualities of the documentary. Racial issues, class issues, ethical problems – it’s impossible to watch the film without wondering at the Pandora’s box opened by this simple concept.
But, in the end, it is the thread of the film itself which is the most haunting, the phenomenon of the bokkie, a teen assassin who seemingly enjoys the murderous work he is doing. And De Mezieres and Rist have dealt with this subject and, by extension, gangsterism as a whole in a fresh and innovative way.
See the film and be informed.
Shooting Bokkie will be screened at Indies Rock Café in Durban on January 23 and at the Independent Armchair Theatre in Cape Town on January 25