Despite a power failure on opening night, Cape Town’s Sithengi film fair went ahead, premiering Gavin Hood’s movie Tsotsi, which went on to cause much controversy throughout Sithengi — did it represent black people in a negative light? But it finally won the critics’ award for best feature, as well as a best-actor award for Presley Chweneyagae.
Such a drama may be a big success, and Tsotsi has already cut a distribution deal with Disney’s Miramax division in the United States, but comedy is what is wanted for the future.
Alby James, who runs the Sediba scriptwriting programme, sent out a call to writers in the industry to submit comedy screenplays. There was a distinct feel that the world was somewhat fatigued by the stories to do with oppression and struggle that have saturated the South African film industry of late.
Comedies, James and others believe, have greater potential to put bums on seats. The script that seemed to grab everyone’s attention at Sithengi this year had a strong comic bent — Money-Making Darkies by David Selitsha and Brent Quinn.
But stories still need to be based in our society. French writer Jacques Akchoti, currently working with DV8 and conducting workshops with writers on the Sediba programme, made this point at the South African Scriptwriters Association (Saswa) conference.
In a paper entitled The Filmmaker as Auteur: Hired Gun or Cultural Worker?, he said a film scriptwriter should write for his or her society in the first instance, rather than aiming at the outset for an international market. While economics were important, said Akchoti, and that meant having an awareness of the international market, writers must think first about reaching audiences in their own society.
The Sediba process continues over a year, with scriptwriters meeting for workshops and being assigned script editors. The importance of good scripts was emphasised by Mongane Wally Serote, chairman of the jury on feature films, who said that writers need to work on the craft of writing in telling their stories. It is no longer enough to be black as a filmmaker in South Africa, he said, and too many South African movies are preachy.
He also mentioned problems of re-presentation, something that was echoed by filmmaker Teddy Mattera when he said, in reference to Tsotsi, that it seemed we had not yet put behind us the boys-in-the-hood model “as a means of telling stories about blacks”. This, he said, was a mindset we needed to change.
On the documentary front, there are interesting projects afoot, such as a film about gender-based violence that will be made as a Unicef/SABC co-production. The agreement was signed at Sithengi.
This project, conceived by Unicef’s Neville Josie, brings together film-makers and girls aged 13 to 18 across South Africa’s nine provinces. According to filmmaker Jane Lipman: “There’s an epidemic of gender violence and those girls are vulnerable young women who are crying to be heard. Our project is about empowerment, and each will be mentored on the production process of filmmaking.”
Sithengi CEO Michael Auret says this has been the film market’s best year ever, with more delegates (many from other countries in Africa; there was a strong contingent from Niger) and bigger audiences — including at the township screenings — than ever before.
Khubu Meth attended Sithengi to pitch a concept to the co-production forum