Among the 28th Durban International Film Festival’s more than 300 screenings are documentary films grappling with issues such as the fallout of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Third World debt dependency, questions around immigration and national identity in Europe, and societal obsessions with weight and youth.
The feature films exhibit the inextricable link between art and society as much as they do the narrative skills and aesthetic characteristics particular to their regions, says festival director Nashen Moodley. ‘A good example is the Korean film, The Host, which has everything you would expect from a monster film … but it is also an intelligent analysis of Korean society, Korea’s relationship with the United States and family dynamics.”
Moodley says first-time directors and those ‘taking the art of filmmaking forward” feature strongly. An example of the latter is the Danish mockumentary AFR, which ‘plays with the conventional notions of fiction and documentary”, with the director Morten Horst Koplers ‘managing to convince various world leaders that the Danish prime minister had been assassinated and that [Koplers] was the assassin”.
Moodley says the African Perspectives section of the festival is short on local films because ‘feature film production has been lower than previous years”. Yesterday director Darrell James Roodt’s new film Meisie will open the festival. His lion-stalker film, Prey, has also been included, and Khalo Matabane’s When We Were Black will be screened in two parts.
From the continent comes Mauritanian-born Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s critically acclaimed Bamako, which revolves around a people’s trial of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the human drama of the protagonists. While debate, philosophy and testimonies form the main narrative thread, Sissako’s use of imagery also drives home pertinent points about Africa’s debt.
Other films include Rachid Boucheareb’s Oscar-nominated Days of Glory (Indigenes), which delves into the untold story of North Africans from French colonies enlisted to fight against the Nazis during World War II; Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda’s interrogation of Africans’ immigration and integration into Europe in Juju Factory; and Zeka Laplaine’s Kinshasa Palace.
The Poverty and Inequality Challenge Film Festival is dominated by ‘films from the frontline of those struggles”, says Moodley. Among those is Tata Amaral’s Antonia, which follows a female hip-hop group and their struggle against misogyny and the social problems infecting São Paulo’s favelas to reach their dreams.
The Gay and Lesbian Cinema Focus includes Argentinean director Alexis dos Santos’s Glue, Tan Lines by Ed Aldridge and Jean-Baptiste Dumont’s Me, Cyprian and the Others.
The WaveScapes Surf Film Festival continues to grow into its third year, while the focus on New Danish Cinema was, according to Moodley, precipitated by the ‘astounding number of great films which have come out of there over the past year”. These include Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All; Annette K Oleson’s examination of race relations, 1:1; and the manga-style animation film, Princess.
The Focus on Cinema of the Middle East provides the expected incendiary documentaries, but one to look out for is Operation Filmmaker. Among the rubble of a fallen Baghdad in 2003, film student Muthana Mohamed tells an MTV crew that his dream of becoming a filmmaker had been destroyed. Invited by an American actor to work as an intern on a movie, Mohamed begins to reveal he is more slacker than sheik.