RALPH ZIMAN (pictured) was on his way to Cape Town in October when he realised the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates had been cancelled.
He came over anyway and exhibited the large wheat paste public art installation, Resistance, originally meant to form part of the summit on the Grande Parade for a few days.
The Joburg-born some time visual artist and film director (Jerusalema) now based in the US, has been working on his artistic side for most of last year. He is also filming friends who are street artists, interviewing them and capturing their work, which may or may not end as a documentary:
But, life can’t all be fun and art because the bills have to be paid, so films have to be made.
He had read the Kite manga years ago and was aware of the film project, but was not expecting to be involved in any way, until a fateful phone call early in 2013: “It was terribly sad because David Ellis had gone over to South Africa to make this film and he didn’t turn up for work on the Monday and they went to the hotel and found out that he had died over the weekend.”
“I got this phone call because everything was in place and if I wanted to do it, I had to get on a plane immediately. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. It is a difficult thing, coming in at the last minute, but the opportunity was there, the timing was right. So, I got on a plane and said: ‘Let’s see if we can pull it together.’”
He got to Joburg just less than six weeks before the principal photography started and completed the process of finding locations and actors and worked with the local art director to pull the look and feel of the film together: “We put up more graffiti which made it feel more grimy and used lots of smoke.
“So is it meant to be Joburg? Well, it’s an unnamed place that could be Joburg. For me, you couldn’t move away from it, it was definitely an African city.”
Ziman says he didn’t change much of the script: “It was more a case of interpreting it, just trying to simplify it a bit so we’d have a chance to finish it in the time we had.”