Despite a dearth of locally made feature films in the past year, the South African film industry is being buoyed by comparatively low production costs that attract foreign films and commercials. And the glitter-dust from Tsotsi’s Oscar win last year and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha‘s Golden Bear for best film at the 2005 Berlinale casts a hip glow on the film industry, drawing aspirant filmmakers. But how hard is it to break into the field?
“The job market has definitely picked up since 1999 — for shooting films, television series, documentaries and music videos — but it is still very hard for young people to get into,” says Mel Mtintsilana, operations and implementation manager at Hotshots, a crewing agency that handles technical crews, including directors, lighting technicians and gaffers.
“When production houses call you up for a crew, they’re usually looking for people with experience and who they trust and may have worked with before,” says Mtintsilana, who admits to a database of “thousands”, with “plenty of CVs coming in every day”.
Heather Basson, student affairs officer at film school Afda, says graduation figures for its BA (Motion Picture) degree from its Johannesburg and Cape Town campuses have “increased quite a bit over the past three years, as has intake”. In 2002 Afda produced 48 BA (Motion Picture) graduates, compared with 160 in 2005.
With universities, technikons and a plethora of film schools offering courses ranging from filmmaking to video technology, Afda public relations officer Oriona Kekana says the market might be saturated, but that “passion” will always ensure that “those who want to succeed, will”.
It is a sentiment shared by Darrell James Roodt, director of the Oscar-nominated Yesterday: “I’m surprised by how many kids are absorbed by the industry. There are definitely too many film schools [in South Africa] at the moment, but how many of them are there to make films? Probably about 20%, the rest are there because its cool.”
Jamie Ramsay, a 24-year-old director of photography (DOP) who worked with Roodt on Lullaby, a junkie-flick set in Hillbrow, said he has been working consistently on commercials. “From about second year in film school you start getting on to set to cut your teeth and you can make connections, so when you do get into the market you should have yourself set up.
“I had a few contacts set up, but there is a huge divide between the low-end work like corporate videos, low-end music videos and magazine shows on television, and the high-end stuff like big-budget commercials and feature films, which is where you want to be ideally,” says Ramsay.
“You will also find that if a young hot director is chosen for a commercial, then he is usually paired with an older director of photography and if a young DOP is chosen then he has a seasoned support crew around him, so opportunities can be limited.”
According to the Cape Film Commission, the growth in shooting of commercials in the Western Cape has seen industry employment figures increase from about 4Â 000 in 1995 to 20Â 000 in 2005.
Roodt says the foreign big-budget focus on Cape Town has helped grow the market and develop the standard of technicians in the city. But with local production houses going for the “tried and tested”, how transformed and accessible is the local film job market?
Not very, says Mtintsilana: “The industry is still white-dominated. It’s a vicious circle because people want experience, and that usually comes with the guys who have been in the industry for a while — and they are white.” Mtintsilana believes there is a “lack of accountability” in the industry regarding transformation because it is essentially “a database of independent contractors looking for work, which makes it hard for government to intervene”. According to Mtintsilana, Hotshots is currently “restrategising” to address the matter.
“People don’t trust easily, I’ve stopped telling people on set that I’ve come out of Afda because then they feel they need to show you a thing or two about the job,” says 25-year-old Alex Hlabangane, a freelance DOP who works part-time in his family’s business.
“It is a matter of who you know and what contacts you have, and you have to ask why there are not very many black DOPs in South Africa,” says Hlabangane, who has set up his own production company, Blackface Entertainment, to stay in the business that he “loves”.
“The market is already filled with production companies at the moment. Everybody wants to make ads and music videos. But we are also working on a formula of straight-to-DVD films with accessible budgets and skeleton crews, which will make films aimed at people from the kasi, [which are] accessible to them. We just shot a film last year, Twisted, which cost us about R100 000 to shoot, in a week — which was crazy — and we’re just tying up the distribution. If we sell 9Â 000 copies at about R50 to R60, we’ll come out okay. That’s what you have to do to stay in the industry, because it is really hard,” says Hlabangane.
It is a formula that has worked for another filmmaker breaking into the industry: Kumaran Naidoo’s low-budget comedy, Broken Promises, sold 50Â 000 copies in its first week of release.