/ 4 February 2000

Birth pangs on the island

Being a film-maker is an obsession. It must be, because one cannot otherwise explain why so many thousands of people of all races and genders, all over the world, are prepared to live in poverty and obscurity simply for the pleasure of being able to describe themselves as film-makers.

South African pay channel M-Net, with its footprint now stretching deep into the African continent, has been conducting its New Directions initiative for the last six years, aiming to increase the number of Africans film-makers by nurturing “emerging African scriptwriters, producers and directors through film-making workshops mentored by industry professionals”.

To date, New Directions, managed by Letebele Masemola-Jones and produced by Richard Green, has produced 20 short films in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, and two full-length feature films in South Africa – the latest of which was the meandering comedy Chikin Bizniz.

The latest leg of the initiative saw 21 aspiring directors, scriptwriters and producers from seven African countries hosted by the ground breaking Gorèe Institute on the Senegalese island of Gorèe. They were attending a three-week workshop led by Burkinabe director Gaston Kabore, African-American film-maker and educator Ayoka Chenzira, and Gambian-born scholar Professor Mbye Cham.

The participants had submitted the most successful projects in a competitive process that had been launched a year before. On Gorèe, they would refine their scripts through the critical inputs of the mentors, as well as their own comments about each others’ projects. In the last stage of the workshop, each national team would shoot a short film.

Us junketing hacks were invited to be on the set to watch the aspirant directors directing these short films – in other words, our job was to watch other people work. It was an interesting exercise.

In the interests of maintaining a level playing field, all the participants were required to direct the same short screenplay and turn it into a five-minute film. They were free to interpret or re-write it in any way they chose, as long as they respected the basic plot and characters.

The seven directors had five hours to shoot and four hours to edit. These constraints were, to say the least, character-building.

So there they stood in the hot winter sun, rushing up and down, waving their arms and talking loudly, just like Cecil B de Mille. They had been given an added impediment in the form of a troupe of actors who had no idea what these would-be directors were shouting about.

The actors, some professional and some amateur, were Senegalese, and naturally spoke only Wolof and French. The directors all came from English-speaking countries. It began to look as if a mean joke was being played on their already sensitive egos.

A director has to access unheard of skills to seduce a movie out of the most unpromising material. Here, on Gorèe Island, with little preparation except for the theoretical workshops, it was gradually dawning on them that they were all alone and in at the deep end. The only way to really learn how to swim is to start swimming.

The new directors were fortunate in having the Senegalese film-maker Moussa Sene Absa as an additional mentor. Absa had been drafted in to write the script that each national team would be challenged to turn into a movie. He had written a deceptively simple story with a rather shocking ending.

Simply entitled The Shoe, the story is about a prodigal son who returns to the family home, bearing gifts for those he has left behind. His father’s is a beautiful pair of shoes. The only problem is that the shoes turn out to be too small, and the old man’s painful attempts to put them on his feet produces some consternation and mirth from family members and friends who have gathered for the occasion. So the father retires, perplexed, to his bedroom, to ponder what to do about the offending gift.

In the final seconds of the screenplay, he reaches for the sword that is hanging on the wall. He places a foot on a low stool, raises and aims the sword …

The film ends on that high dramatic note, as the sword descends, cutting to black over the old man’s screams. We assume that the old man has chopped off part of his foot to make if fit into the shoe, and that presumably thereafter, all shall be well between the generations.

It is a strange little story, very much within the genre of what we have come to know as “African film”. Perhaps its successful realisation depended on the ability of the individual film-makers to work within the conventions of that particularly West African world of dream, myth and folklore merging with reality.

How would the Zimbabweans, Kenyans, Ethiopians, Tanzanians, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and, especially, South Africans, long dislocated from this kind of language, respond to the challenge? Well, that was precisely the process we had come to see being played out on the island of Gorèe.

It was the penultimate day of shooting. Four versions of the story were already in the can and were being edited on the mainland. There were three more to go.

Absa was loping around the set in his long purple robes, shoulders hunched, his pipe and lighter clutched in his hand in case of a personal emergency, appearing to remain impartial as the seven different directors unleashed their interpretations on his story.

By the time the last of the directors were having their turn, he, like the crew and the acting team, was nearing exhaustion. But he knew that he had to keep himself going for the sake of everyone concerned. His voice was getting hoarse, his patience sometimes wearing thin, but he was everyone’s main man. He had to combine the functions of assistant director, interpreter and nanny. Rasping out in Wolof, French and English, his was, inevitably, the most authoritative voice on the set. At times it even seemed as if he, rather than the director of the moment, was actually calling the shots.

But Absa is not a selfish or possessive man. “It’s amazing to see how many different ways other people can interpret your script,” he muttered to me in a pause between camera set-ups. He was finding the process as revealing as the participating directors and producers were.

The combined effects of language problems, personal insecurity, and pressure of time inevitably produced a series of little films that, at the end of the day, were pretty similar, staying faithful to the original scenario.

One effort, however, stood out from the rest. Zimbabwean director Celine Gilbert decided to throw caution to the winds, and make a virtue of all her disadvantages. Since the workshop was taking place in the West, she said, (even if it was only the west of Africa) she had decided to shoot the story in the style of a Western. The result was energetic, original, and highly entertaining. It was a spirited demonstration of the fact that film-making, at its best, is as much about inspired interpretation as it is about mechanics.

The final question, once we had all packed up and readied ourselves to leave the wonderfully evocative environment of Gorèe Island, was: did it work? Can you actually teach anyone how to make a film? Is M-Net’s initiative noble but obscure?

The answer is a straightforward “Yes, well, no,” or rather, “No, well, yes.” Or simply, “Ja-nee.” Films will keep on being made or not made.

M-Net should be applauded for keeping the process going. Perhaps they will ultimately turn up some gems. But film, and the making of film-makers, is an elusive process. When it comes down to it, one wonders whether film-makers, like other kinds of storytellers, are made or simply born.

John Matshikiza was among a group of journalists invited to Gorée Island by M-Net