Mail & Guardian reporter
New filmmaker Benning Puren has been awarded funding for two projects by the Arts & Culture Trust. For the project Masjien, Puren has collaborated with designer Jaco van Heerden to create an accessible outlet format for young media artists. The two have dubbed themselves Berlin East (Puren) and Chloorbom (Van Heerden).
Masjien is an independent project focused on exposing local creative talent to work and form opinions of all mediums and media: design, art, film, video art, new media/design, fashion, music, and so on.
It is to serve as a more progressive alternative to conventional media such as magazines or televisions; both, in Puren’s opinion are not quite able to facilitate new media.
In relation to the project, Puren says: ”I’m sure a lot of young creative people feel they are not being represented in any way by the content of local broadcasters and magazines … Our initiative will be their opportunity to say, ‘listen, this is what we like’. Masjien is an outlet for work too progressive for traditional channels …”
To serve the idea they are in the process of constructing an online site, www.masjien.com. The site will serve as the basis of the Masjien project, exposing creative individuals, work and opinions. The site will keep up to date with current news, events and trends relevant to local creative culture.
The soon to be launched Masjien video extension will focus on new South African film, video art and inserts with an aim to enhance the local short film culture that Puren regards as ”the only logical path to a feature-film culture”.
”We will be needing contributors who have super sharp writing, design and new media skills,” Van Heerden says.
They are seeking out what he terms, ”disinfected minds who’ll get out and about often in their neighborhoods, towns and cities.
”This could potentially be a great way to expose South African talent to the rest of the world.”
They are encouraging designers and new media architects to submit designs like screensavers, splash pages and so on.
Puren’s previous work, also the recipient of Arts & Culture Trust funding, was a short fiction film called Starstruck.
This work included the participation of the substantial blind and deaf community in Worcester.
Starstruck is a simple story, played out in eight minutes. A scheming promoter, played by Andre Roothman, exploits the singing talents of a blind girl by placing her, unknowingly, in the wings during performances while her pretty sister lip-synchs in front of the audience.
The idea behind the project was to use the fiction format to create an awareness of Worcester’s institution for the blind.
The work was first screened at Cape Town’s Labia cinema and has subsequently been screened at Worcester’s Stargazer cinema. ”One of my personal highlights,” Puren says, ”was seeing Nadia, the blind actress, attend the screening”.
Puren was born in Worcester in 1977, and studied photography at the Hugo Naude art school under Sergio Vaccaro. He studied film production at the Cityvarsity multimedia school in Cape Town, specialising in directing. His video work was first broadcast on the arts magazine programme Flux in 1997.
Starstruck is to be screened at the Cityvarsity film festival, to be held in Cape Town in September this year