Victoria West, like all small towns in the Karoo, has an endless capacity to surprise. Three things you (probably) didn’t know: its museum houses fossils of the Atherstonia Scutata, a sea fish extinct 230-million years ago; it was once the domino capital of South Africa; and one of its famous sons, Group Captain Petrus Hendrik Hugo, was an ace World War II fighter pilot.
Make that four: now it is a catalyst for the national film industry, through the annual Apollo Film Festival. This showcase of South African independent film completed its third edition last week, supported by an enlarged coalition of sponsors motivated by altruism and enlightened self-interest, as well as canny appreciation of the positive domino effect that the festival can exert in the local industry.
Not only the sponsorship platform grew for this year’s event. The films were of a higher quality, and a testament to the vigorous possibilities of independent endeavour. Take the feature film by the Academy of Film and Dramatic Art (Afda), Soldiers of the Rock, which received a special mention. A notable collaborative effort by Afda students, with much sponsorship-in-kind, it deals with a subject core to the South African story: gold mining, and the men from whose labour and deaths others extract value.
In the same production vein is the feature film winner, Promised Land, made for R2-million, but, in essence, for free by its cast and crew. An act of creative faith showing dedication to making films with a South African aesthetic, Promised Land is of a piece with director Jans Rautenbach’s empathy with the notion ”If you build it, they will come”.
”They” — the South African film-going audience — were the focus of much discussion, informal and formal. Five discussion slots were devoted to the vexing topic of The South African Audience — and South African Film. The most volatile of these sessions focused debate on successful versus good films. In what seemed a relinquishing of personal credo, Andrew Worsdale contended that the problem lay in message movies, and the solution in ”finding entertainment”.
”People don’t want films about apartheid and anguished characters,” said Worsdale, whose landmark 1986 feature, Shot Down, was screened the previous evening. A timeless document of a particular facet of the Left’s struggle against the apartheid security apparatus in the 1980s, Shot Down was a revelation. It was decades ahead of its time and remains a lesson in telling a South African story with integrity, and sense of place and time. It displays director Ross Devenish’s maxim that a director needs to know ”Who you are, where you are and what time it is”.
Those qualities were evident in Ubuntu’s Wounds, the winning short film. Its director, Sechaba Morojele, took issue with Worsdale. ”It’s dangerous to say don’t make these kinds of films. Rather say make them, but accept that there will be financial problems. Movies like Mr Bones are successful, but they come at a certain cost, they diminish our culture.”
Showing a firm grasp of who and where were the documentary winners. The Tap chronicled the provision of clean running water in a community near Port St John’s; those seeking, for feature purposes, a South African story could drink long and gratifyingly from such a source. Strong Enough, the student documentary winner, is another story of intense human struggle, this time among impoverished fishing communities in Cape Town. It is an essential antidote to prevailing media images of that Cape of Good Hope beloved by hedonists.
Among films celebrating a polyglot, multi-cultural country was student short-film winner Black Sushi, by Afda graduate Dean Blumberg. His work, and films by fellow Afda filmmakers such as Danie Bester (Skitterwit, a powerful and compelling binary account of change) and Rudi Steyn (Senter, an economical seven minutes using rugby as social metaphor), point to a long-promised land of new South African film.
Defining the way there is cinematic art such as Waiting for Valdez by Dumisani Phakati, winner of the Adjudicators’ Special Award for Excellence in Film. The magic of movies and their ability to touch audiences is captured in this poetic work, filled with unforgettable images. With films such as this, we need not worry about entertaining audiences. Now all the industry needs to resolve is something that all the talk at the festival could not: how to make films accessible to audiences who are historically, financially and geographically removed.
Darryl Accone was an adjudicator at the festival. He writes in his personal capacity.