The film festival film

A documentary film about a black filmmaker and her struggles to make a film about Marike de Klerk.

Image credit Old Location Films End Street Africa, 2019.

Shit got real at the debut screening of the exciting short film, Film Festival Film at the 69th Berlinale. The South African short film follows Fanon—played by Lindiwe Matshikiza—trying to shop her film at the Durban International Film Festival, one of South Africa’s two major industry events. At the end of the screening, during the question and answer session Fanon was invited to talk about her role in the film by Mpumelelo Mcata, one of the film directors. Fanon instead turned to Mcata and co-director Perivi Katjavivi and pointedly asked, “how do you feel as two black male directors taking all the credit for a film that is essentially about my struggle?” Flipping the script on the post-screening epilogue, Fanon cut to the chase about stuff at the heart of this quirky, surprising short film.

Image credit Old Location Films End Street Africa, 2019.

The film sets Fanon’s agonising attempt to pull together a film pitch. We see her rehearsing the plot of her somewhat ridiculous film about the tragic death of Marike de Klerk, the former wife of the last apartheid president F.W de Klerk. She was brutally murdered in 2001 by a security guard working at her beach-side apartment complex. During his time as president F.W de Klerk cultivated an image similar to Gorbachev in the West, as a “great reformer,” while Marike, who he divorced while negotiating with Nelson Mandela, struggled to adjust to her new life.

The film shuttles between the claustrophobic, yet atmospheric setting of her tiny hotel room where she is heard constantly running through her pitch and the bright, kitsch rooms of the Sun Coast Casino resort where the film festival takes place. Her performance well captures the fraught struggle of a young black female filmmaker trying to hustle in a business where the odds are stacked against her.

Film finance and race are two major themes that the crew seem to want to comment on, but they do so in playful, ironic ways. For example, early on Fanon announces that it is considered normal that white directors package and sell black stories while she does not get the same treatment. This is an odd narrative reversal: a young black woman complains that her script about the death of a white Afrikaner politician’s wife is not attracting funding. It is as comically biting as it is bitter.

Image credit Old Location Films End Street Africa, 2019.

Documentary and film genres are spliced together unevenly throughout the piece. The crew includes scenes where filming is intruded upon by folks just wanting to say hi at the festival, and the use of interviews and backstage scenes that include Matshikiza, seemingly out of character, candidly commenting on how she feels about performing. Blurring reality and fiction only helps deepen its mischeivous questioning of the film business. This is the product of some sharp craft in plotting and cutting, however haphazard the crew wish to make it seem.

Image credit Old Location Films End Street Africa, 2019.

At the screening, the directors looked at a loss for words when confronted by Fanon in the question and answer session. They tried to dodge her question and sidestep the volley of follow-ups from women in the audience who wanted to know about authorship, power and positioning. All the while members of the crew in the audience recorded sound and footage as the robust discussion unfolded. The recordings could have been for posterity.

But then this is the Film Festival Film, a film about a film festival that was just a side-project that, the directors admitted, was never intended to make it to Berlin. It could just be another punchline in what is already a fascinating mockery of the contemporary film industry.

By provoking this kind of lively discussion in Berlin you could say the crew were taking a gamble, staking their audience’s faith in the integrity of the film on the greater goal of asking big questions about the business of film making today. Indeed, if anything, this is Film Festival Film’s real strength, that it makes you wonder where critique begins and filming ends. It is a troubling proposition that makes you feel unsettled, unsure, and gets people talking. But then, isn’t that what all good works of cinema are meant to do?

Further Reading

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Fatou Cissé’s directorial debut meditates on the uncertain fate and importance of Malian cinema amidst the growing dismissiveness towards the humanities across the world.

The meanings of Heath Streak

Zimbabwean cricketing legend Heath Streak’s career mirrors many of the unresolved tensions of race and class in Zimbabwe. Yet few white Zimbabwean sporting figures are able to stir interest and conversation across the nation’s many divides.

Victorious

After winning Italy’s Serie A with Napoli, Victor Osimhen has cemented his claim to being Africa’s biggest footballing icon. But is the trend of individual stardom good for sports and politics?

The magic man

Chris Blackwell’s long-awaited autobiography shows him as a romantic rogue; a risk taker whose life compass has been an open mind and gift to hear and see slightly into the future.

How to think about colonialism

Contemporary approaches to the legacy of colonialism tend to narrowly emphasize political agency as the solution to Africa’s problems. But agency is configured through historically particular relations of which we are not sole authors.

More than just a flag

South Africa’s apartheid flag has been declared hate speech by a top court. But while courts are important and their judgments matter, racism is a long and internationally entrenched social phenomenon that cannot be undone via judicial processes.

Resistance is a continuous endeavor

For more than 75 years, Palestinians have organized for a liberated future. Today, as resistance against Israeli apartheid intensifies, unity and revolutionary optimism has become the main infrastructure of struggle.

Paradise forgotten

While there is much to mourn about the passing of legendary American singer and actor Harry Belafonte, we should hold a place for his bold statement-album against apartheid South Africa.