This year’s Encounters documentary film festival is important: it is a dialogue of local and international film art that comes at a crucial time for South Africa and the world.
Documentaries, long an accepted and much-vaunted means of hurling sticky issues on to the debating tables in Europe, offer an unblinking and often emotive look at subjects as diverse as identity, human rights, forgiveness and religion. And because successful documentaries go hand in hand with democracy, South Africa’s offerings at this year’s festival are a rare and important glimpse into the soul of our nation.
“In scripts so far, I’ve seen this longing to peel off layers and show what the real South Africa is about,” says Dutch director Marijke Jongbloed, whose film Beyond Reason is being shown at Encounters. “There is a huge desire to find their own voice.”
Jongbloed, together with four other international documentary directors, has headed up various workshops and taken part in the Documentary Co-production Forum (DCF), the second project of its kind, where South African filmmakers have the opportunity to harvest local and international support for their projects.
Jongbloed says local filmmakers are very concerned with issues of identity. Certain themes, also, have been recurring, but she hopes local horizons will broaden more in the future.
“The urge is there,” she says. “There is a lot of passion — and not a lot of concern with commercialism.”
South African filmmaker Riaan Hendricks’s film, A Fisherman’s Tale, is an example of this passion. A highly personal documentary, it is a tribute to his parents. It follows Kalk Bay’s impoverished fishermen, whose lifestyles are under increasing threat from big business. Hendricks manages to explore both the personal and political in a multilayered film that is concerned primarily with identity.
“I was inspired by the need to communicate, to be able to say something about how I felt about my background,” says Hendricks. “I’d never encountered this expressiveness until I started studying film, and realised the emotional potential of a good documentary.”
Although still lagging behind Europe and the United States in terms of quality, Jongbloed says the South African documentary seems to be following the European style, as opposed to the American.
The concern, among local directors, with real emotions, with “having the patience to sit around and get people to reveal themselves layer by layer”, with opening all sort of doors to various issues within a film, as opposed to the more one-directional US style — where audiences are led into thinking a certain way with very little open-endedness or room for debate — seems to be the style of choice for the majority of our up-and-coming filmmakers. Good news, says Jongbloed, for the film form as a whole.
“We are entering an increasingly complicated world, politically, but also in terms of human rights and what we gather from news snippets doesn’t come close to the truth,” she says. “A documentary film in which you can study an issue and make up your own mind is extremely important to the health of our society.”
British-Nigerian director Onyecachi Wambu says this essential openness around documentaries is important for Africa to gain a better understanding
of itself.
“In Africa, there is the problem of literacy and the variety of languages, and I think the visual medium is a very good way of getting communication going. It is amazing how many people on this continent have access to television, but the problem is what is being pumped through. In the end, Africans are understanding everywhere else but not themselves.”
Wambu directed Hopes on the Horizon, a historical study of positive social change in six countries on the continent, which is showing as part of Encounters. With its use of the oral storyteller (griote) as the narrator that knits the film together, it is aimed at Africans.
“I think it is critical that Africans understand themselves if there is going to be any real change. Change has to be internally driven. The film aims to really open up the debate on new solutions for the continent.
“It is also an attempt to put things in their context and understand where we are now a lot better. When you see Africa in the news, there is no historical context at all, no hint of a process — simply snapshots of mania.”
For Jongbloed and Wambu, documentary filmmaking is also catalytic, both in method (filmmakers can cause things to happen just by being there) and in the effect on their audiences.
“I think in a lot of documentary filmmakers you will find a little missionary, but you have to be humble at the same time; you can’t change the world with a documentary,” says Jongbloed. “One thing that you can do is get minds working.”
In Beyond Reason, Jongbloed uses a Dutch woman (Gea) who corresponds with a man on death row (Bryan) as the vehicle through which questions around the death penalty and US society are raised. Her auteur style is subjective, and primarily concerned with the emotions of the characters. When Gea must find out about Bryan’s crime to re-open his case, the momentum for a story is created. But beneath this primary storyline doors open on to issues of crime and punishment, and the unforgiving nature of US society — something that Jongbloed as a filmmaker aimed for from the outset.
“I am very inspired by human behaviour, how people interact with each other … and where this leads us, which is into a story,” she says. “Going into people’s heads and following what happens is a very exciting momentum to deal with as a filmmaker.
“There is also a crossover with fiction in terms of structure — the introduction, set-up, turning points, confrontation and resolution — which works well on audiences.”
For Hendricks, making documentaries is less structured. “I literally saw the film take shape in the editing room. That’s when the whole political layer came out. It was never really manufactured: it simply appeared through comments that people in the film made.”
Being a journalist meant Wambu approached the documentary differently, choosing to focus on meticulously researched issues
and problems as opposed to characters’ emotions. “I like the rigour of explaining an issue, but there are ways of storytelling that I like as well, such as the African oral tradition, a storytelling technique that … has greater resonance with audiences. The film is a hybrid of both those styles,” he says.
Wambu and Jongbloed’s films are rich, because they relied heavily on research. “To be a successful documentary filmmaker, you have to shoot your film out of abundance,” says Jongbloed. “The more you know, the more you are on top of it, the more freedom you have to choose which threads to explore in a film, and the more likelihood there are of things collapsing into your lap.”
Contrasting local with international films at the festival, one can see how foreign directors have gone out of their way to bring a variety of issues forward and to reach wider audiences, through extensive research and careful character development. Both skills keep the curiosity of filmmaker and audience at a peak, which is essential if the film is to reach its destination.
Because documentaries like A Fisherman’s Tale have been created out of a personal space, they are courageous projects that South Africans must see, since they offer such a rare chance to gain a better understanding of ourselves. But for all their cathartic value at home, they may alienate international audiences.
The consensus among visiting directors is that the huge potential in South Africa can only be unleashed on the global scene once filmmakers look at broader issues. Currently our dialogue is reading a little like a group therapy session, which is all fine and well 10 years after democracy. Perhaps next year will be the year of moving on.
The details
The Encounters South African International Documentary Festival 2004 takes place at the Cinema Nouveau, V&A Waterfront, in Cape Town until August 1 and at the Cinema Nouveau, Rosebank Mall, in Johannesburg from July 30 to August 8. More info: Tel: 082 16789. Website: www.encounters.co.za