It doesn’t take much to make a bottleneck pipe. You sommer hit a coke bottle against the corner of a table and … But art doesn’t always oblige life.
This is unfortunate when you’re on your 20th take, shooting a shebeen scene in Langa township, getting sandblasted by a southeaster that is turning your nostrils inside out… And when that doggone bottle won’t break, you start to think that the gods of moviedom are conspiring against you.
But that’s hardly the stuff that would deter the cast and crew of Thetha Msawawa a new youth drama series due to be screened in April on SABC. Roughly translated from Xhosa as “News Hounds”, the 13-part series has united some of the most formidable local independent film-makers.
Activist, journalist and documentary film-maker Eugene Paramoer directs the series. Raised by the “school for unsentimental film-making”, Paramoer’s television coups include the 1999 Boss of the Road widely regarded as one of the finest television discourses on the vicious warfare of the minibus taxi business.
Kethiwe Ncgobo and Renee Williams of Fuze Box Productions a wholly black-owned production company responsible for several successful youth programmes are producing the series. Ncgobo’s brainchild, it should be noted, was BabyFathers a searingly honest documentary shown on e.tv on June 16 about three teenage fathers living in the townships.
Thetha Msawawa was commissioned by SABC Education to promote, according to the press release, “a human rights culture” among South Africa’s youth. The series was written by Tulani Mkhize and Tumelo Phadi during worskshops run by British script editor Alby James. It has taken two years to develop and two-and-a-half months to complete shooting.
During this time, apart from the usual pressure cooker factors, such as a tight schedule and even tighter budget, the cast and crew have had to contend with the premature evacuation of the art director, along with some of their props. They’ve had to perfect cliff-hanging stunts involving kids and a wheelchair; shooting in volatile locations, such as Langa, Bonteheuwel and the holding cells at Muizenberg’s Magistrate’s Court.
Then there was a three-day stretch on Robben Island with a single communal tap as the only source of fresh water. And of course there’s been the weather alternating between nostril-singeing heatwaves and gale force winds, giving a literal meaning to the phrase “true grit”. But this, in a sense, is what the series is all about: gritty realism, both in front of the cameras and behind.
For one thing it combines the insights and input of former activists, exiles and Umkhonto weSizwe cadres, former South African Defence Force soldiers and gangsters-turned-security guards. And we’re talking about the crew here, not the cast of characters. For another, the stories focus on the jagged bits of shrapnel that embed themselves in the skin of South Africa’s youth on a daily basis.
The series revolves around four grade seven students from diverse backgrounds who are co-opted to run their school newsletter. They don’t exactly bond instantly, but with each investigation into stories drawn from life experiences, they develop a greater awareness of the issues facing themselves and their communities.
But this is no koeksister variation on an Enid Blyton theme, although Ncgobo admits to being inspired by British television storytelling. Neither is it another Yizo Yizo wannabe although the conceptual similarities are apparent. “We wanted to make the stories and characters real and integrated, to evoke a sense of gritty realism,” says Ncgobo. “Our aim is to interrogate lives and experiences with humour, sensitivity and a sense of the dramatic. “Our characters are not always heroic. They don’t always come out on top and sometimes the lessons they learn are pretty painful.”
Thetha Msawawa is also Paramoer’s first venture into directing a drama series. But for him the transition from making dramatic documentaries to directing dramatised documents has been seamless. “The reason I got into television in the first place is because I love telling stories about people and because I have a fascination for the image,” he says. “My concerns in this drama series remain the same.”
But sometimes, to recoin a clich, the frictions of life are more bizarre than its fictions. For example, a couple of days after shooting in Langa’s Joe Slovo informal settlement almost the entire area was razed by fire. Then of course there was the unbreakable bottleneck incident. And of course, budgetary constraints that inhibited the use of state-of-the-art visual technology to produce truly nail-biting special effects.
“If we had the resources we could have done superb stunts,” said Paramoer shortly before the final shoot on Robben Island. “Even though the issues we tackle are important the visuals have to grab the audience and hold them.” But if process can be reflected in product, Thetha Msawawa will be a winner.
If the series is about youth empowerment, it is also a tribute to team spirit on the part of its young cast and motley production crew who made sturdy material from the threads of modest resources and a shoestring budget. Most importantly, perhaps, the series bears testament to the growing power of South Africa’s burgeoning culture of independent film-making.
After all, it has taken the SABC 25 years to figure out that all it needed to do to reach 60% of the population the youth was speak to them directly. Through series such as Thetha Msawawa it is finally doing that.