Out in Africa (OIA), South Africa’s Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, has not only survived into its ninth year but is expanding in interesting ways. It is now directly involved in the development of queer filmmaking in this country, having run scriptwriting workshops in 1999 and 2000. Several viable products grew out of those workshops, and OIA now has its fingers in the production pie. OIA financed or co-financed three of the movies on this year’s festival — the short film Everything Must Come to Light, the documentary Property of the State: Gay Men in the Apartheid Military, and the feature Proteus.Everything Must Come to Light is one of two short documentary films by the late Mpumi Njinge, a promising filmmaker who died last year at the age of 28. It deals with three women who are both sangomas and involved sexually with other women. Property of the State is a full-length documentary by Gerald Kraak that investigates the experiences of gay men in the South African army under apartheid, from those subjected to aversion therapy to others who ended up performing in drag for the troops. The feature film Proteus will be shown at this year’s festival as a work-in-progress. Co-directed by South African Jack Lewis and Canadian John Grayson, Proteus tells the true story (though unconventionally fictionalised) of the 1735 conviction and sentencing to imprisonment on Robben Island of a Dutchman and a Khoi man who were found guilty of “mutually perpetrated sodomy”. The festival’s involvement in such exciting projects can only extend its reach across the country — and the world.That reach will spread further with the application of new technology. Many of the films shown at the festival in the past have been video projections — 35mm prints are expensive to make and to transport. But the clunky old Betacams that were used to project these videos have been supplanted by new digital systems, which will allow large amounts of data to be captured on hard disk and then beamed into cinemas via satellite. This will save the festival money in the long term, as well as making it possible for OIA, in the future, to take the festival to places other than the three urban centres where it currently shows.OIA is also putting its toes into the waters of distribution. It has bought the rights to one of the American movies on the festival this year, LIE (which stands for Long Island Express, in case you were wondering), and will “peddle it to other festivals”, as festival director Nodi Murphy puts it. Funds thus raised will be reinvested in filmmaking in South Africa, particularly lesbian cinema. The dearth of such locally produced material in recent years has led Murphy to aim for a “portmanteau” lesbian project — a group of five 15-minute movies.Murphy has changed her views on her interactions with local filmmakers submitting work to the festival. In previous years, she and OIA generally let such filmmakers go their own way, to put their work on the festival without interference. Now she’s more interventionist — telling one filmmaker to tighten up his short film, which meant cutting it, and advising another to put subtitles on her movie. Hopefully such attention to detail and quality (for advice from a film person as experienced as Murphy can only be good) will help local audiences bond with local product more enthusiastically than they have in the past.Stanimir Stoykov, director of two short films on the festival, the hilarious Leaps Ahead and Thrush (the latter being the one to get the tightening operation), was grateful for Murphy’s advice, and for the opportunity to show his work on the festival. In future, he said, “I will be the first to be knocking on Nodi’s door.”As ever, this year’s festival showcases a wide range of movies, from the angry to the controversial to the light-hearted, the glossily produced to the practically home-made. Other South African shorts include Koos Roos’s Stof, Francois Coetzee’s Tacet and Stelana Kliris’s Unmasking Mavis. Among the features are the French comedy-drama The Adventures of Félix (Drôle de Félix), the aforementioned LIE (dealing with under-age sex), and the drag-king pirate movie Girl King. Metrosexuality, set in London, is about a 17-year-old black straight man with a lesbian mum and two gay dads. Several films deal with aspects of the contemporary gay lifestyle, from The O Boys, about a successful orgy club, to Webcam Boys, which is self-explanatory; there is also The Gift and Undetectable, which deal with issues around HIV/Aids. Two movies, This I Wish and Nothing More and Diary of a Male Whore, deal with the sex industry in Hungary and Palestine respectively. Tipping the Velvet is a BBC TV drama about lesbian love in the Victorian underworld, while Treading Water is about a lesbian longshorewoman. And that’s just the tip of the, er, velvet.
A booklet with full details of all movies, with screening times, is available from the relevant cinemas. The Out in Africa South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival shows at Cinema Nouveau, Johannesburg, from March 6 to 16, in Cape Town from March 13 to 23, and in Durban from March 27 to 30. Visit the OIA website at www.oia.co.za