The Apollo Film Festival in Victoria West, in spite of recent ups and downs, is an idea that isn’t going to go away. This was proved by two enthusiastic guys, Faku-Faber Booysen and Dicksey Betha, who hitchhiked over 300 kilometres from Barkley-East near Kimberley to attend. They burned to make movies, they’d written scripts, but there was nothing in the Northern Cape to assist them. Just the yearly festival…
The 6th festival had an emphasis on South African feature films, documentaries, professional and newcomers’ short films. The feeling of the festival is low budget, rough and ready, but this year there were new developments, particularly with the participation of a group of Belgian students as part of an Open Doek initiative.
The Open Doek is a remarkable cultural organisation based in the town, Turnhout, near the Dutch Belgian border. Their headquarters are in the town’s multiplex cinemas – rather like setting up an independent film organisation at our Cinema Noveau complex to encourage film. They promote Asian, Latin America and Asian films, and arrange film festivals throughout Belgium during the year. They also raise money to purchase and distribute on DVD a selection of films from world cinema.
The Open Doek participation is the beginning of an exchange programme. Some of this year’s jury members will participate in festivals in Belgium, while youngsters from Victoria West who made two short films during the festival under the guidance of director Zulfah Otto-Sallies will go to Belgium at some stage. The films were shown at the awards ceremony.
Professor Hubert Dethier from Vrije Universiteit Brussels served on the feature film jury, and Mayke Vermeren worked on the short film jury. Dethier, whose work on South African film was acknowledged at the festival, has written extensively on our cinema and has co-authored a book with Martin Botha on the director Manie van Rensburg, published in Flemish. Vermeren, a freelance film lecturer from Antwerp, has edited a book Roetes: Conversations and Reflections on South Africa Cinema.
There were other firsts at the festival this year: the Youth Jury Award, decided by a group of Belgian and South Africa students, and an Audience Award. The former went to the important HIV film, Beat the drum, not yet released in South Africa although it has reportedly been with distributors here for three years. The latter was awarded to director Gustav Kuhn’s Afrikaans film, Ouma se slim kind, an obvious favourite with festival goers. His film, about a mentally-challenged boy, also won Best Script.
Darrel Roodt’s Faith’s Corner, in competition with films that included the Oscar winner Tsotsi, won Best Film. Best Cinematography went to Lance Gewer for Beat the Drum and Tsotsi, best actor to Presley Chweneyagae (Tsotsi) and best actress to Leleti Khumalo (Faith’s Corner). Roodt also won best director.
Francois Verster’s brilliant The Mother’s House, about Miché, a young girl growing up in Bontheuwel in the Cape, won best documentary. Verster was at the festival, fresh from New York where he won an Emmy for his documentary, The Lion’s Trail.
Best short film in the newcomer section was Willem Grobler’s Considerately Killing Me, about a young filmmaker who has to confront social issues, including HIV. Brett Melvill-Smith was named most promising director for his films Tracks that dealt with male prostitution and drugs, and Modder Koffie about black and white relations. Quinn de Matta’s surreal look at a father and son in Ever Dark was awarded a special mention.
Face Value, about racial relations in the new South Africa seen through a white shopper and a security guard, won Best Professional short film. The animation movie about a woman and a dog, Sam had never seen her look so sad, got a special mention.
The awards had some surprises that established the festival’s independence and showed it wasn’t going to follow overseas trends. In fact, the festival could become a vital, seminal platform for South African films. This year the newcomer’s section particularly showed there was a passion and zest among young moviemakers. We could get set for a new wave, although the films aren’t as multicultural as they could have been: the movies tended to be too white, and male at that. One found the multiculturalism in the feature films.
The past wasn’t neglected either. At this year’s festival veteran South African filmmaker Jans Rautenbach, whose films in the 1960s and 70s upset the Afrikaner establishment, was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. Martin Botha’s in-depth study of his films, Jans Rautenbach: Dromer, Baanbreker en Auteur, and Deborah Steinmar’s Jans Rautenbach: Sy Memoirs, combined in a beautifully illustrated book published by Genugtig!, was launched at the festival ‒ a step, as Botha suggests, in recovering our film history and creating “a full history without silences”. The festival, he suggested, was where or film past and present met.