Winning one award at the San Diego Film Festival was unexpected enough for Vereeniging-born, LA-based director Rudolf Buitendach. Winning two, he says, just blew him away. The director’s second feature film, Where The Road Runs Out, picked up the festival’s top prize, Best Feature, and the newspaper San Diego Union Tribune’s prize for Best Film, too.
During the festival’s weekend run, which included screening films like The Imitation Game (Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley), and Wild (Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern), Buitendach says he wasn’t even sure of the film’s place in the festival’s line-up.
“With all these movies showing there, like Wild, ours was this small little indie, so we wondered, ‘where do we fit in?’” Buitendach chuckled over the phone from LA. “It was just unexpected because the festival was rich with Oscar contenders,” agrees fellow South African, actor Stelio Savante, who’s also based in LA. “It’s not like one has false expectations. We were just honoured to be there.”
Buitendach believes it was the chemistry of his actors that earned them the prize.
The film stars Savante, with award-winning Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankole and US actress Juliet Landau, as well as South African newcomer Sizo Motsoko in a story about a scientist who goes to Equatorial Guinea to try to get back to his African roots and befriends a boy from the local orphanage with the lure of some chocolate bars.
“It’s a compelling character-driven story,” says Savante.
“One person told them it reminded them of Beasts of the Southern Wild, another of Chocolat. So it’s just great to hear people are responding to it like that.”
Another element that stands out is that the film was shot in Equatorial Guinea, a country that doesn’t have much of a film industry.
“It’s the first feature to be shot in a country that has been known for despotic regimes and its oil,” explains Buitendach.
He says they faced “some real life-threatening situations” that came with shooting in a country that made headlines almost 10 years ago for a failed coup of the president involving Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark. One such instance involved having an AK-47 pulled on his crew. He also says they had to smuggle in film gear: “Our gaffer smuggled in parts of a skateboard to build a dolly because you just couldn’t get equipment.”
But with all the hassle, why film in Equatorial Guinea anyway?
“The financing came from there,” he says.
“Our Dutch investor was in the cocoa bean trade and has business there and wanted to put something back. He felt like he was taking resources out and wanted to give something back culturally. I can’t think of too many countries around the world that don’t have film.”