After a decade director Oliver Schmitz has completed a film that challenges Hollywood’s black stereotypes Andrew Worsdale In 1988 a relatively unknown newcomer directed what was to become what is regarded as the best anti-apartheid feature film ever made – Mapantsula. It was the story of Panic, a small-time crook (played by the late Thomas Mogotlane) who stays out of politics but discovers that he can’t stay apolitical after he is picked up by the cops for questioning, and dumped in a cell with township militants. Many critics heaped praise on Mapantsula, regarding it as reflecting more of the real Soweto than an entire collection of Cry Freedoms.
It’s taken Oliver Schmitz 12 years to get the financing to make another feature film, Hijack Stories, which recently opened the Planet Africa section of the prestigious Toronto Film Festival – an event regarded as the key introduction for a foreign movie to the United States market. Hijack Stories had three screenings at Toronto and received rave reviews in the local press. It tells the story of Sox Moraka (Tony Kgoroge), a talented actor and part of Johannesburg’s rising black middle class. He’s a well-known TVEpersonality, dates a blonde co-star and lives in a penthouse in theEnorthern suburbs. While hosting music video shows he dreams of becoming an action hero … la Wesley Snipes so when the opportunity to audition for the role of a gangster for a TV series comes up he returns to the ghetto to rediscover his roots and trains for the part. In the process he is “re-educated”, going through a crash course in the finer, and deadly, points of gangster life. The role reversals and the ugly realities of criminal life make for a devastatingly effective satire that upends Hollywood’s formulaic and glamorised portrayal of black men, violence and the ghetto. The film looks at how resentment can grow in a community that is defined by those with opportunity and those without. “I let the issues seep through the characters rather than making something didactic,” says Schmitz. “There’s a tremendous change in the cultural environment at this time and the film reflects that. I’m also fascinated by how the younger generation of black people are growing up without theEconnections to the apartheid past unlike their elders.” With Mapantsula and now Hijack Stories, as well as his award-winning television series Rhythm and Rights, about a township community radio station, it mightEbe inferred that Schmitz is a white film-maker who makes “black” films. But he says it’s more complicated than merely being labelled a political ideologue. “It’s a complicated issue and I’m trying to thrash it out, but to me it’s a question of being African, which I am. “As a white African I’m trying to integrate myself into a broader context. Of course, there’s a lot of baggage that comes with that. In Toronto for example the Afro- Americans were very perturbed that the opening film of the African series was a story about black people directed by a white man. The African filmmakers there, in contrast, were not worried and were very supportive of me and the film.” What’s extraordinary about Hijack Stories, though, is that it was completely financed by overseas investors with its R18-million budget coming from Germany, France and Britain.
Christoph Meyer-Wiel, of Schlemmer Film in Cologne, says that he did approach local producers such as Anant Singh and Jeremy Nathan of the now defunct Primedia Pictures, “But they strung us along for ages so we finally decided to just go ahead ourselves.”
Meyer-Wiel was given the script at last year’s Cannes Film Festival by Schmitz. He read it that night and by the morning said he wanted to produce the film. Because Schmitz possesses both German and South African passports they were able to secure European co-production funding. Schmitz co-wrote Hijack Stories with poet Lesego Rampolokeng and it took about three years to reach a final draft stage. The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology gave a grant of R50 000 without which Schmitz would have been unable to write the screenplay or travel to Cannes in order to get the project off the ground. A seven-week shoot was hampered by three weeks of rain, but the film finished on schedule and on budget. Schmitz spent 14 weeks in Cologne and Munich in post- production on the picture. It is set for release in France in the European spring and soon after that in the United Kingdom. Several US distributors have expressed interested but nothing has been signed yet. As for South African distribution, there is a deafening silence from Ster-Kinekor and Nu Metro, which sounds all too familiar. The sad reality is that the talented Schmitz will probably have to wait another decade at least before local investors and exhibitors get behind anything South African, besides Leon Schuster. In the meanwhile he’s working on a new script, a contemporary adaptation of Othello set in Johannesburg, but without the Shakespearean dialogue. And who is putting up the money? Well the Germans, of course.