The TriContinental Film Festival opened with a scandalous bang at the Rosebank Cinema Nouveau in Jo’burg.
The festival is celebrated as a site of alternative cinema, but the front film of this year, The Choir by Australian Michael Davie, represents the vilest of colonial anti-black representations of our times. Black suffering is packaged for the upliftment of white anxieties and to massage the tormented spirits of the middle classes both black and white. This is blackxploitation on steroids.
The Choir is driven by the usual Hollywood format: deviance, repentance and redemption. The film tells the story of a choir in Leeuwkop Prison, the notorious site for holing up society’s offending black men. We lock these wretched men into cycles of gang violence, drugs and rape to punish them while we desperately hope for their rehabilitation — anything to break the beasts will do so that we may sleep easier at night.
In true Hollywood tradition young Jabulani Shabangu, who is in for “house breaking with intent to rob”, is the lead actor and the supporting role is played by Coleman Mgododlo, the likeable bank robber turned choir master who, through song, models the broken spirits back to humanity. It’s all an emotional affair: nail-biting preparations for the biannual prison choir competition and hard work is rewarded by a victory that brings a tear to the eye.
But the thing is rigged; the very documentary form has been compromised in the quest to fulfil the voyeuristic desires of the filmmaker and the waiting audiences. Some cuts suggest that the film was staged; little wonder Shabangu, who was dragged out for the festival opening night for us to ogle at, thought the film was going to make him rich and famous.
The politics of The Choir are embedded in the old art of blaming and vilifying the victim while absolving those who benefit from the structural dictates that produce the black criminal. By 17 Shabangu’s body and spirit had already been thoroughly battered: his face scarred, bones broken and his teenage body riddled with bullets. He symbolises the violence that the majority of blacks are trapped in, which drove Steve Biko to say it’s a miracle that black people in townships survive to adulthood.
Instead of showing how the privileged 20%, which is predominantly white, produces the suffering 80%, which is black, the filmmaker demands repentance from the victims of this cruel imbalance. In a depressing scene Shabangu confesses to the camera, as though coerced Big Brother style, that he is “a failure” as his fantasy of giving his daughter a better education lies shattered. But Shabangu and his daughter and son have limited options available to them. Their defeat was fed to them through the umbilical cord long before they saw the sun.
What’s ironic is that this exploitation of blacks is presented as an act of love and sacrifice by the white benefactor. Michael Davie spent six years making the film, with little funding, we were told repeatedly. The truth is: the fame and fortune Shabangu was hoping for will be bestowed on the benevolent Davie. During the Q&A session it transpired that in fact, to keep the filming project going, Davie had to endure strikes from his actors, who wanted compensation for their labour. He gave each actor a double peanut-butter sandwich and a tea bag.
Just before the film was shown we were serenaded by the current Leeuwkop prison choir. It brought the house down, standing ovation and all. No one objected when we were told that the subjects of the film and our entertainers wouldn’t see the film with us, or in prison. Used and discarded, they returned to prison. We applauded. We were uplifted. The applauding audience didn’t hear Shabangu and Mgododlo’s heartfelt pleas for financial assistance to deal with the hardships of life outside prison.
The TriContinental Film Festival runs in Cape Town at the V&A Cinema Nouveau until August 31, at the Brooklyn Cinema Nouveau in Pretoria from August 29 to September 4 and at the Gateway Cinema Nouveau in Durban from September 5 to 11. For programme details go to www.3continentsfestival.co.za