I remember when I was about nine years old my father stuck me in the Rio Cinema on the corner of President and Sauer streets, while he worked as a journalist at The Star and my mother sweated in a clothing factory in End Street. I was left to my own devices and the cinema was as good a place as any to feed my fantasy.
The Rio was like many other movie houses of its time, with burgundy red seats and silver walls with gilded curtains over the screen. I recall the harlequin masks and the cherubs trying to scare me as they jumped out of the walls while I made my way down the aisles to my favourite seat near the front. I liked that spot because once the curtains opened I was swallowed by the light and transfixed by the enormity and fearlessness of my favourite stars Lee van Cleef, Sydney Poitier, Bruce Lee and, of course, the great Burt Lancaster, who starred as Bob Valdez in the film Valdez Is Coming, which was to be the inspiration for my own short film screenplay, Waiting for Valdez.
Let me tell you a little bit about how that all came about. When we were kids growing up in Western township, near the old Sophiatown, we seldom had money to go to the movies. So we pooled our coins together and elected two of the more senior and spirited of our peers, Tox (Anthony) and Feya (Faizel), to go and watch the film. They would return to deliver live feverish renditions in one-hour episodes over a week around the imbawula — with Tox painting the visual action to such an extent that you could taste the spectrum of colours used in the film. Feya would back him up with a kicking sound and effects track, everything from the sound of a cowboy kissing a frothy saloon hooker to a Winchester firing at a moving target 100m away. When Feya fell out of sync, Tox would give him a smack across the head and say: “My laaitje, ek gaan nou rewind, maak net weer kak dan moer ek jou — almal van julle! [My boy, I’m going to rewind now. Just mess up again and I’m going to fuck you up — all of you.]” When Tox disappeared into the story, God forbid anyone mess up his flow. He used to scare the shit out of us.
Eventually, Tox and Feya graduated to girls and “nice time” and so around that fire I, too, graduated from being a cinema-goer to a live storyteller.
So you’re probably wondering what the connection is between this and Max and Mona, my first feature film, which is out in the cinemas this week. Legend (otherwise known as my late grandmother, Ouma Dinkie Lebakeng [Mattera]), has it that in a particular clan of the Batswana, certain men would be given the responsibility to lead the grieving process at funerals. They were known as professional mourners, something that was passed on to them by their ancestors — a birthright.
Then along came another storyteller, known as Don Zinga Mattera, my father, who gave a comic rendition of his mother’s story, this time set in the notorious Sophiatown. There his underemployed friends would dress themselves up and go in search of funerals, any funerals, where they could cure their babalaas and fill their empty stomachs until they were hounded out by angry mourners for crying too loudly or calling the deceased by another name. And so was born my idea for the story of the King of Tears, now known as Max and Mona.
So why do I call Max and Mona a love letter to my city? There’s an old film called Jim Comes to Jo’burg. Well, this film is about Max, a contemporary Jim from Zwartruggens come to pursue his dreams of becoming a doctor in Jozi.
I’ve watched characters like Max from the time of my Cinema Paradiso childhood ’til today, arriving in the mean streets of Jozi — streets talked and sung about by many, like Mbongeni Ngema in his classic Stimela Sase Zola — and losing their way in the madness, the chaos and the spirit that engulfs this place. I have seen black men and women whipped into kwela kwelas [police vans] and (black) lovers sitting on concrete pavements eating fish and chips from oil-stained papers while white people enjoy the comforts and warm romance of dimly lit restaurants. And I’ve also seen the black people of Jo’burg walk taller than the Carlton Centre. So, for me, this film is about triumph in the face of adversity.
When we see Max and Mona do their rural shuffle to the tune of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in front of the Wits Great Hall, we find their innocence attractive. Little does Max, Mona or the audience know what a baptism of fire Jozi will serve up — from the thumping beat of Soweto to the refined tree-lined streets of Houghton; from the petit dangerman Razor (“the fastest blade in town”) to Max’s alcoholic uncle Norman and his bumbling sidekicks, Six and Skeel, the characters and their surroundings spell “chandies” (a word peculiar to Jo’burg that can mean anything from trouble to good times).
This is the Jo’burg I know, where I can chill with my hijacker friends on the street corners, eating AK-47s (a long roll filled with chips and polony) and later engage in academic kak with my learned friends at Spiro’s in Melville. This is the Jo’burg that Max also learns to love, the way I have for all these years.
As Max journeys through Jo’burg, from funeral to funeral, we see him showing off his talent, sometimes strutting like a peacock and at other times tearing at the seams under the spell of this mesmerising city.
For those of us who have persevered and seen that, over the concrete skyscrapers, there is no promised land but this one — Jozi, my Jozi, hola 7. See you at the cinema!