In Khalo Matabane’s debut feature film Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, Tony Kgoroge plays Kenilwe, a burdened, morose South African writer teetering on the brink of insanity. Preferring to spend time alone, Kenilwe habitually heads to a park in Hillbrow, a wooden bench slung across his shoulders in a constant self-crucifixion ritual.
It is here that he meets Fatima, a displaced Somalian who reluctantly discloses her horrific tale of survival. After a few encounters, Fatima disappears out of Kenilwe’s life. As he goes on a wild goose chase, desperate to hear her story, which he knows somehow mirrors his own, she turns out to be a metaphor alluding to the tenuous haven that South Africa has become for millions either escaping persecution or pursuing a better existence.
But true to Matabane’s trademark auteur style, Kenilwe — who decides to record the seemingly random encounters he has with immigrants on Jo’burg’s streets — is merely a vehicle for his own disorientation.
“So many people have said to me: ‘Khalo, it’s about you.’ And I feel completely displaced,” admits Matabane. “I don’t feel South African at all and often I don’t even read the newspapers. The country feels foreign to me and I just don’t recognise it.”
His disillusionment, Matabane says, can be attributed to what he views as the disturbing, growing greed and acquiescence in American and South African societies and his disbelief at how “in 10 years or less, our leaders, who have gone through the battlefield, have incorporated themselves really well in another economic system”.
Like the city of Mogadishu portrayed in Nurridin Farah’s Links, a book Kenilwe consumes with feverish obsession, Matabane’s Johannesburg is an ambiguous place with conflicting values.
“Melville and Hyde Park may as well be Brooklyn and Manhattan,” declares Matabane, inside the plush confines of The Venue, Melrose Arch, as his film plays in the auditorium beneath. “Their aspirations for ruthless wealth by any means are the same. Their intolerance is the same.”
He attests to being on a warpath against the prevailing Hollywood aesthetic. “At the heart of cinema is Western cultural imperialism and that’s the most ruthless imperialism in the world and that’s the truth about cinema. It is anti-black and it is anti-African. At the heart of it lies the fight to control the world.”
In his speech preceding the screening, Matabane called Conversations an act of defiance. “It was not enough for me to make a political film, but the process of making the film itself had to be political,” he later states. “The way we raised the money for the film, it was [from] private individuals and some of them are the millionaires sitting here. The film itself was not restrictive. There was no script. We shot it over 19 days and sometimes we’d sit on the set for a while not knowing what to shoot next.”
His penchant for the unconventional often means that Matabane makes films that languish in obscurity, something that doesn’t seem to bother him. “You can’t talk about film in terms of mass audiences,” he says emphatically. “That’s the beginning of insanity for me. When you decide to play jazz you don’t stop and ask, ‘What if it does not sell?’ For Wynton Marsallis to think that he’ll sell Eminem’s albums is ridiculous. And I love Wynton but I’m not responsible for people’s education. Thabo Mbeki and the government are responsible for that. So maybe it’s time for the Patrice Motsepes, the Saki Macozomas, the Phuthuma Nhlekos and the Cyril Ramaphosas to say we’re tired of giving money to soccer, we want to fund films. No country can exist without its national cinema.”
Although Matabane professes a distaste for television, he is currently completing a TV series for the SABC about a community in Soweto before the June 1976 uprisings, which looks at how an apolitical community was politicised by circumstance.
Conversations, which has been a festival hit since it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, has also been picked up by the Sundance Channel, a United States cable television network that airs independent films, giving Matabane access to 23-million viewers.
Of his continuing obscurity locally, Matabane says: “I think art’s real value cannot be measured in the present. Some of it will be discarded in the future and some of it will gain prominence. I feel I make cinema of the future, something my children’s generation will reflect on.”
Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon opens at Ster Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau across the country on Friday.
The four-part series When We Were Black airs on SABC1 from December 21