This year’s National Arts Festival film curator has named the programme the Magna Carta of film festivals.
Curator Trevor Steele Taylor figures that with liberties falling away throughout the world there is no time like the present to look at freedom of speech and thought and how filmmakers make themselves heard.
A long-time admirer of the works of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, Steele Taylor thought the 40th anniversary of the humanist’s death seemed a perfect time to pay homage to the way he was constantly battling power structures like the church and censorship.
“It was also fortuitous that Manfred Zylla, the Cape Town-based German artist had done a series of 120 small paintings inspired by [de Sade’s] The 120 Days of Sodom, which was the basis of Pasolini’s Salo, so that segued into a larger Pasolini programme,” said Steele Taylor.
That particular exhibition will be at Grotto Mojito, corner of High and Somerset Streets, while the films screen at the main film venue, the Olive Schreiner Hall at the Settler Monument on the Hill.
In addition to the NFVF screening their works in the Gallery in the Round at the Monument, the Festival will also screen films as part of the Think!Fest programme at the Eden Grove Complex on the Rhodes University Complex.
This year the Festival will also host a Bioscope programme on Fingo Village Square, screening some very old films which haven’t been seen in years.
“Back in the day there were hundreds of extremely cheap exploitation films made, basically as a scam to give money back to the government. They had to be non-political, with entirely black casts and in the vernacular.
“They were very profitable for a range of white entrepreneurs and filmmakers, basically one-shot wonders.
“Today they are being re-packaged and black audiences love them, probably because they are entirely non-political action films no longer linked to the apartheid structure,” said Steele Taylor.
They will screen Joe Bullet (about a mysterious gangster who sabotages a soccer team’s chances of winning an upcoming championship match) and Umbango, which is a Zulu western.
The film Zuma, though, has nothing to do with our president but is a remake of a popular comic book from the Philippines about a monster with a pet snake.
Filmmaker Cedric Sundstrom will be interviewing South African auteur Jans Rautenbach before the screening of his first film in 35 years, Abraham.
“We are also showing his first film, Katrina, and Jannie Totsiens which was our first, really satirical in a way, art film in the country,” explained Sundstrom. “He definitely headed the pack over the years. I don’t think there are many other South African filmmakers who can claim his kind of work. He delved into contentious issues, like love across the colour bar when no one else would make a film like that. Also he put coloured people onto film as a people that we should take note of when others didn’t.”
Abraham is a story based on a person the director actually knew and all his films screening at the Festival will be subtitled.
The two older films are actually copies originally given to the British Film Institute, hence the subtitles.
• Check www.nationalartsfestival.co.za for the full film programme at this year’s National Arts Festival.