/ 29 July 2011

Durban film festival doesn’t put a foot wrong

The DIFF has gone from a smallish university-based festival to something that seems to bestride Durban like a colossus.

“Can you feel the buzz?” someone asked me excitedly at the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) last weekend.

Yes, I could feel the buzz. It was so loud I could barely hear myself think. I could practically smell the sweat of the filmmakers lining up at the Durban FilmMart to make their pitches, to manoeuvre for funding, to hear the National Film and Video Foundation’s pronouncements in one of the many workshops offered as an adjunct to the festival and film market, or those eager just to tell one another about their latest projects.

In fact, the FilmMart has gone from zero to a hundred in one year — this is only its second year of operation, and yet it was already jam-packed with filmmakers, funders and other interested parties, including the sponsors of an award from sports-items company Puma, offering a whack of money to help new entrants into the industry to get their projects off the ground.

And the DIFF itself has grown enormously. “Bit by bit,” says organiser Peter Rorvik of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for the Creative Arts, but he’s being too modest. DIFF is now unquestionably the biggest and best general-interest film festival in the country, with more than 150 films on show. I can’t remember when last I attended the DIFF (it could have been as many as 10 years ago), but it has gone from a smallish university-based festival centred on the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre to something that seems to bestride Durban like a colossus.

Full houses
All the cinema chains of Durban have bought into it, with the Avalon Group, which runs the cinemas at the Suncoast casino-mall, offering the premieres of the South African movies in a huge movie house that was full for each premiere. (It has to be said that the projector in the big theatre isn’t really up to the task, leaving most of the movies shown there rather dim and soft of focus, but it’s still a prime venue.)

Opening with Otelo Burning, a tale of surfing youth set in Lamontville township in 1989, the festival went on to premiere Charlie Vundla’s crime thriller How 2 Steal 2 Million, the comedy Taka Takata and others.

Audiences were appreciative and many stayed after the credits had rolled to hear the relevant filmmakers take questions.

Skoonheid, the much-lauded new movie by Oliver Hermanus, wasn’t a world premiere (as MC Nashen Moodley wryly put it, that privilege went to a little festival in the south of France), but it was South Africa’s first chance to see this remarkable piece of work. It lived up to expectations. As one experienced filmmaker said to me, of the director: “He doesn’t put a foot wrong.”

Apart from the obvious entries, there were many sidelights to relish. My only regret is that I couldn’t make it to as many screenings as I’d have liked.

When else in South Africa is one going to get a chance to see, on a big screen, Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, which is 148 minutes long but composed of only 30 shots? Or the extraordinary Gandu, an Indian film that is a million miles away from either Bollywood or the seminal work of that great pioneer Satyajit Ray (who received a mini-retrospective at the fest)?

Challenging conventional expectations
Gandu, which means “asshole” or “moron” in Indian slang, is a low-budget but highly inventive movie about a disaffected young man who (when he’s not crawling into his mother’s room to steal from the guy she’s having sex with, or taking drugs or jerking off) raps his anger at the screen amid a plethora of wildly designed subtitles. Oh, and it’s almost all in black and white.

Some hated it, some were shocked; I heard one viewer complain to his companion, as he left: “I thought it was a comedy.” Me, I thought it was hilarious (as well as disturbing), and just the kind of thing we need to see more of in South Africa: more movies from places other than the American Empire, more movies that challenge conventional expectations.

As for the running of the festival, anyone expecting something a bit ramshackle would have been surprised. A transport manager, between frantic calls to drivers on her cellphone, half-apologised to me for any delay; I reassured her that, as far as I was concerned, the organisation of the fest was superb. I thought all concerned did a great job, and I look forward to DIFF 2012.