Driving a road trip adventure
Director/writer Lwazi Mvusi chats to Robyn Cohen about what has driven her to make her road trip caper Farewell Ella Bella – her debut fiction feature film – which is being screened at The Durban International Film Festival (July 20-23) and will be released nationwide at cinemas on August 1 What’s it about?
Farewell Ella Bella tracks the journey of a young woman, Ella (Jay Anstey), who leaves Beaufort West after her alkie dad (Lionel Newton) dies.
She hooks up with her musician godfather Neo (Sello Maake Ka Ncube), who has been absent for most of her life. Ella and Neo go on the road to Joburg to bury his ashes in her childhood home.
Farewell Ella Bella is the first feature film to come from the Emerging Black Filmmakers (EBF) incentive programme.
Tell us about writing the script, which veers in surprising directions.
In writing the script, the theme that seemed to persist was this presentation and then subversion of characters. In South Africa we have a lot of stereotypes. And stereotypes become stereotypes because they are generally true characterisations of people.
With this film I wanted to play the stereotypes but then also flip them so you see another side of the characters. And that’s true to life.
There is a version of ourselves we present to the world but we are all multifaceted. We aren’t just one-dimensional. We have our prejudices. We make our mistakes.
We hurt the people around us – but we can make a choice to learn from all of that and try to be better.
And all of the characters in this film do try, to varying degrees – and I hope that’s what will endear them to the audience.
What was the inspiration for the storyline?
I wrote this script after a road trip with my family from Cape Town to Johannesburg where we drove the route that Ella and Neo drive in the film. It was the first time I really engaged with the towns along that Karoo route.
We stopped in Beaufort West and Kimberley, which both feature strongly in the film, and I was fascinated by the idea of the people who live in these parts of the country. And the story just came from there.
I never write about people I know or things I have experienced.
My inspiration is vague. It can be a picture, a headline or – as is the case with Farewell Ella Bella –a landscape.
How long has it taken to make the film, from outline to wrap?
It has been a long trip. I wrote the script as part of my master’s degree at Wits University in 2012, but I never thought anything would come from it until the call for submissions from the EBF transformation fund at the end of 2015.
We pitched in early 2016 and went into production in October 2016. Then 2017 was spent in post-production, and here we are.
The film has been selected to screen and is in competition for awards at the Zanzibar International Film Festival and DIFF this month. We’re very excited to be taking our cast to DIFF for the South African premiere.
In September we will be screening at the Festival International de Cinéma et Mémoire Commune (International Festival of Cinema and Collective Memory) in Morocco.