Film producer and director Philip Brooks was an intermittent but regular feature in the lives of many creative South Africans. An intrepid traveller, he seemed to enter and leave the local film industry at will. But in his life he turned out so much South African content that he could be considered a honorary South African filmmaker. This in turn would make Brooks a honorary South African.
Right up until his death this week of liver failure Brooks was committed to this country, a place he considered a second home — after Paris, his real abode. By now, many who knew him will know that he had requested half his ashes be scattered here.
Those who met him in the good restaurants he frequented while on the job will remember the irrepressible Brooks as one who taught the most politically astute of local filmmakers how to eat, drink and work at the same time. This was something alien in the self-conscious days of anti-apartheid culture when food itself was considered politically incorrect.
In those days people tended to approach life, and foreigners, with suspicion. There was a class of outsider who came to town to get something out of apartheid itself, and Brooks appeared to be one of those. While the emergency raged and foreign journalists and donor organisations pumped presence into the country, as young cultural workers we never stopped to ask who the foreigners really were that we met along the anti-apartheid way.
Brooks first arrived in Johannesburg — one claim has it — in April 1986 to make a Channel 4 news insert focused on media and the emergency.
Another is that Brooks came to the country as a print journalist working on a story for Time Out about the cultural boycott.
Later he would return to make the award-winning Apartheid’s Assassins, about the revelations of the Harms commission. As an anti-apartheidnik Brooks became so embroiled in local affairs that he eventually became barred from the country and had to write a film script with then-journalist Ivor Powell in Swaziland.
In the course of working with Brooks one would discover his quirks — one could never quite pin him down. But his recent personal testimony, the documentary My Own Private Oz (2000), lays his journey bare.
Born in Australia in 1953, to British parents, Brooks spent the first 18 years of his life on the island of Tasmania before escaping to Melbourne. There he got involved in the early Seventies scene of free sex and drugs.
In 1975 he traveled as a freelance journalist to Cambodia to cover the fall of Phnom Penh, on the same journey he landed up “doing time” in a Bangkok prison. As he puts it, “For me heroin became the great escape. By 1975 my Australia was junk, junk and more junk.”
Then Brooks made an escape. “I ran away,” he says, “because I wanted to be a homosexual … I had to leave to reinvent myself.”
This reinvention happened in Paris where Brooks established his production company Dominant 7 with his partner Laurent Bocahut. In Brooks’s work before and with Dominant 7 we have some of the most important and creative projects to have emanated from South Africa at large.
These include documentaries done with the early collective VNS/Afravision that consisted of Brian Tilley, Lawrence Dworkin, Nyana Molete and Jeremy Nathan. Others include collections of short movies Africa Dreaming (1998), Short and Curlies (1996), The Double Life of Donna Ermelinda (1995), Oliver Schmitz’s Jo’Burg Stories (1997), Zola Maseko’s The Foreigner (1997) and The Life and Times of Sara Baartman “The Hottentot Venus”.
In gay film Brooks distinguished himself as a pioneer with Woubi Cheri (1998), his exploration of cross-dressers in Abijan was hailed as “the first film to give African homosexuals a chance to describe their world”. This week sees Dominant 7’s major coproduction Madame Sata, about a Brazilian boxer and drag, showing at the Sundance Film festival.
Last year Brooks and Dominant 7 played a pivotal role in the production of the HIV awareness series of documentaries Steps for the Future. This included Brian Tilley’s It’s My Life, Dumisane Phakathi’s Wa n’ Wina and Brooks’s own 6000 a Day: Account of a Catastrophe Foretold. In this work Brooks — now the Aids activist — highlights some of the world’s missed opportunities. Like so many millions in sub-Saharan Africa, Brooks was living on borrowed time.
In our subcontinent Brooks found a sense of common cause. His commitment in the complex and greedy world of film leaves a vacuum to be filled.
Philip Brooks, born 1953, died January 5 2003