On November 12, a week before the 35th International Emmy Awards ceremony in New York, Roberta Durrant, South Africa’s executive producer of Penguin Films, will be giving a lecture to media studies students at Indiana University on the creation of the Emmy-nominated television series, Home Affairs.
The series, which uses six female protagonists to tell parallel stories, has received two Emmy nominations, in addition to being a finalist at the Banff Awards in Canada and a runner-up at the Golden Rose Awards in Switzerland. The programme, which has picked up international distribution, is the second by the company to be nominated, the previous one was sitcom Stokvel in 1994.
‘There have been a number of high-end series being produced locally, like Heartlines, but the thing that makes Home Affairs stand out is the unusual format and the strong storyline and characters,” said producer Durrant.
The nominations, she said, will benefit South Africa’s film and TV industry. ‘The more our product goes out internationally and gets recognised, the more the possibility of selling it beyond our borders. In that way we start to become serious co-production partners to the rest of the world.”
Apart from the best drama series nomination, one of the lead actors, Brenda Ngxoli, is up for the best performance by an actress award, battling it out against international thespians Lilia Cabral, Muriel Robin and Victoria Wood.
Although her schedule has had to accommodate a flurry of interviews and photo shoots since the announcements earlier this month, Ngxoli has more or less maintained her composure, using the spotlight as an opportunity to thank those who supported her career. ‘It’s hard to comment on what will happen next for me; I’m not God,” said Ngxoli. ‘All I can wish for is positive energy and growth, be it personal or career wise. I’ve never been a greedy person. I’m just on a life journey and I plan to use my talent to tell stories creatively.”
For the past few months the Cape Town-born actress has been pursuing a guerrilla theatre project involving staging performances in public spaces.
‘I take issues like HIV, TB or high blood pressure — all the medical issues that affect people of colour — and mix it with mythology; I try to demystify them,” she said, speaking from the phone in her publicist’s office in Jo’burg. ‘I’ve been doing that without funding, with the help of two friends. Some are documented, others are not because it is expensive to hire a camera. So I research issues and take them to the people.”
If nothing else Ngxoli hopes the nomination will create awareness about her projects, helping her to secure more funding.
Sorted, the only other South African programme to make the list, was nominated in the best comedy series category. ‘It’s very rare that South African productions get nominated for the Emmys,” said Robbie Thorpe of TOM Pictures, which produced the series. ‘Often our television programmes are not innovative enough, they have been just competent and award ceremonies are looking for innovation.”
Thorpe said the comedy’s success lay in the way it used its local environment and did not shy away from exploring the complex and the mundane. ‘There’s an area where comedy is universal, and Sorted is very specifically a local show. But even with those specific issues, there are universal themes. I think the more local a show is, the more interesting it is for international judges.”
The series, which was largely improvised, starred Lionel Newton and drew comparisons with Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office for its slow-burn humour that eschewed one-liners and gags. ‘It wasn’t the easiest show to follow, but once you got it, it was like you were on the inside,” he said.
During its run the show built somewhat of a cult following, but it was not enough to get it re-commissioned by SABC3. ‘The good thing about being nominated is that we get to meet people internationally who think the show is good,” said Thorpe. ‘Being nominated is already winning.”