The recent international documentary film festival in Nyon, Switzerland, showcased five South African works
Neil Sonnekus
If a recent documentary film festival in Switzerland is anything to go by, South
African films are rapidly losing their cringe factor.
This is largely due to Cape Town suss and Swiss expertise. The former belongs to director of the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Nodi Murphy, along
with Big World Cinema producer Steven Markovitz. The latter belongs to the likes
of the Swiss cultural organisation Pro Helvetia and directors like the avuncular
Alexander Seiler.
At first it was just a matter of the Swiss coming here to present their work,
but that wasn_t good enough. _They had to work,_ Murphy says with a combination
of local bluntness and Irish charm.
Three years ago the wordy Encounters South African International Documentary
Festival and Laboratory was born. Three Swiss directors and their local counterparts instructed 12 first-time film-makers. Four of these then got a commission from e.tv to produce a half-hour documentary.
How the 1999 quartet got to the Visions du Rel International Documentary Film
Festival in Nyon a fortnight ago was due to a little cultural pro-activism by
its director, Jean Perret.
Looking like a suave, but tired, chief inspector from a drama policier in his
tie-less grey suit and charcoal shirt, he said: _Our aim in Nyon is to be connected, to network with people involved in good, independent documentaries.
To improve this network we decided to go to Cape Town, because I knew about this
Encounters._
Nyon is a small city on a steep hill about 20 minutes_ drive from Geneva. Dominating its postcard-pretty looks is a large chateau that, at the time, was
under renovation and wrapped in thick plastic. Further down the hill two Roman
columns overlook Lac Lman (Lake Geneva), a large mass of water inhabited by
swans and seagulls, beyond which towers the distant colossus of Mont Blanc.
The first South African film shown was My African Mother by Catherine Winter.
Though a gentle and nostalgic tribute to those women who have often almost single-handedly raised white working parents_ children, usually at great expense
to their own family lives, it is not sentimental and does not pull its punches.
One woman, seemingly without rancour, said, _No white person will let you rest
if you_re tired._
But Winter does not give us establishing shots of the townships or suburbs in
which the retired maids and masters respectively live. This gives it a cluttered, almost claustrophobic, feeling.
Others, however, didn_t mind this and were impressed by her idea of getting people to talk about their maids on a radio show and then using that discussion
as part of the _sound design_, along with footage from home movies in the Sixties.
The next film, The Fight by Eddie Edwards, was about Andile Tshangolo, a boxer
who wanted to fight his way out of Chukuktown or Marconi Beam squatter camp in
Cape Town. Breathtaking in its single-mindedness, Tshangolo_s desire to win was
so great that it even got the white women boss for whom he tends horses completely gaga about boxing.
But this simple story implies a very profound question we as South Africans have
been asking ourselves, whether consciously or not, for decades: are we _ collectively _ winners or losers?
Next there was The Lady Was a Mashoza by Nokuthula Mazibuko. Interfaced with the
play Bozzoli _ Like Pantsula _ Like Mshoza that ran at the Market Theatre, it
deals with the female equivalent of the pantsula street gangsters in the Eighties. If not all that interesting to watch, Perret later said _it_s so important and interesting for us to discover this subculture [existed] during
apartheid_.
The last of the quartet, JG Strijdom is Very, Very Dead, was considered the best
and was in competition for the regards neufs, which means _we feel a new talent
coming up_, according to Perret. Set on Strijdom Square in Pretoria, Pule Dipare_s film is a meditation on a day in the life of that place with its ugly
history and aesthetics.
The director_s own words in voice-over sum up part of the reason for its success. _I have come to this place on a journey of memory and discovery._ Well
shot by Clifford Bestall, the piece breathes and is not just wall-to-wall talking, the main criticism of the three other documentaries.
One of the judges on the regards neufs, local film-maker Dumisane Phakati, said
perhaps the reason why our films are so dense is because South Africa is _a talking culture_. In response, Seiler quoted Dutch documentarist Johan van der
Keuken as saying that what is required is _less info, more content_.
This festival, however, was not the end of the affair but a work in progress
according to Perret. Staff will be exchanged, along with skills, and Seiler has
come up with the novel idea of getting four South Africans to make 10-minute
documentaries in Switzerland.
The main question was: did these films get any special treatment? _They have
been selected,_ Perret said matter-of-factly. _So they_re good. No doubt._
Apart from these local films, there was The Guguletu Seven, which started off as a brilliant political thriller but slowly got swamped by that South African need
to explain too much. What it did achieve, however, was to contextualise victims
and their relatives_ pain during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
_I tried to make a document that would be of historical use to future generations,_ director Lindy Wilson said. And it will.
Most of the smaller prizes dealt with women_s issues, such as an arranged Muslim
marriage; two sisters getting to know each other better; and the charmer about
ordinary working women in Casablanca, Morocco.
The regards neufs prize was a visually and thematically dull film about a German
woman investigating her ex-Nazi engineer father against the background of her
mother_s suicide in the Sixties.
A more contemporary issue was the Kosovo war. The jury made a point of objecting
to the way the documentary Children of Kosovo, 2000 was made. That the stories
were harrowing is a massive understatement and that the director tried to make
art out of such misery was, according to South African jurist, Zakes Mda, _child
pornography_.
The films that won the two second prizes were by French and Canadian men and set
in the developing world, the former being a _witty, nuanced_ look at various
missionaries trying to convert the Huli tribe of Papua New Guinea before the
millennium.
The latter was about a Jim Morrison-like figure trying to find Life Without Death by crossing the Sahara from its west to east coasts. He did, but when he
went back nine years later he was killed by bandits.
Though indulgent like many of the other works, it did have a dramatic tension
one couldn_t help admiring, though Rooms of Shadow and Light by English-Finnish
film-maker John Webster was philosophically and developmentally more sound.
Set in a Bombay brothel, it deals with the female, transvestite and girl prostitutes with a non-judgemental, non-intrusive eye. Using local crew it balances out the hopelessness of the prostitutes_ situation with a near-saintly
young doctor who cares for them.
The winner of the international prize, however, was The House of Cain by Christos Karakepelis. With its subject matter as simple and traditional as can
be, the director got seven ordinary people to talk about the act that morbidly
continues to fascinate us: murder.
Each killer has a different way of dealing with that archetypal transgression.
It was the film_s execution, as such, that swayed the jury. Balancing hard confessional facts with innovative interpretation, the jury rightly thought this
work pushed the envelope of documentary making.
One of its haunting images is of a warder, pacing through his domain of barred
darkness and light, instructing us about the condition humaine like a peripatetic Aristotle at the Lyceum in ancient Athens.
For information about the Encounters Film Festival and for laboratory applications visit www.bigworld.co.za. For Visions du Rel see www.visionsdureel.ch