Let kids make up their own minds about what to watch
B Y this time, you may be sick and tired of the hullabaloo about the film
Of Good Report, but don’t let all the nonsensical babble dissuade you from seeing the film. It is interesting and well-acted.
South Africa has been through amazing changes. Most people would look at our politics and our economy, but there are also those, like me, who are enjoying the evolution of a South African film industry that offers new faces and new stories to tell.
In this case, however, the censors, more formally known as the Film and Publication Board, managed to shoot themselves in both feet. I would have preferred the head, but what can you do?
Perhaps you were on holiday or asleep while all this happened, so let me give you the salient details.
Of Good Report was the proverbial storm in a tea cup. In terms of publicity, it scored a major goal and it also achieved useful exposure for the Durban Film Festival.
The censors were not quite so smart. They viewed Of Good Report and told the organisers the film could not be screened because, they said, it depicted sex with a minor.
This was laughable. The character Nolitha is a teenage girl, but actress Petronella Tshuma is an adult who plays the role of a much younger person in the film. The banning of the film at the festival was like dropping a blazing match into a box of fireworks. The media climbed all over it and even the censors realised this was not a game they could win.
They swiftly caved in, with an absolutely ridiculous decision to grant a no-persons-under-16 age restriction, mere hours before the festival’s closing ceremony. That’s like saying, “Sorry, your favourite prize dog had to be killed, but next time we promise we will let the other dogs in.”
That decision made me wonder why we still have censors. What, exactly, do they do? They see umpteen movies every month, and they impose their various restrictions on the films, but do South African audiences pay any attention to them?
Here’s a typical example. I sat down to watch Ray Donovan, a series on M-Net, Channel 101, wondering what it was all about. I saw veteran actor Jon Voight was back on screen, which is always good news, and the same goes for Liev Schreiber. It’s a tough thriller, in which Voight is a released prisoner with several scores to settle. Schreiber is his son, who is really not keen to have his convict dad hanging around his family.
The series features violence, some nudity and language that will blister your ears. M-Net has been scrupulous
Having overthrown white, strictly religious Afrikaner rule, we still have censorship
in giving us a clear warning of the content and screens it at 9pm, when younger kids should be asleep.
M-Net does the right thing, but I wonder if the censors ever go into a cinema complex on a busy evening. When I go, I regularly see young kids buying tickets for a film with no age restriction, but as soon as the films begin, the kids just swap cinemas. They buy a ticket for Despicable Me: 2 but 10 minutes later they have sneaked into the cinemas in which the age-restricted movies are showing.
Those kids know what they are doing. They make their own choices and, to my mind, that is what a sensible society does. You don’t achieve anything when you just impose a restriction based on the ideas of the few people who sit together to see the film and pass judgment on it.
It boggles my mind that having finally overthrown white, strictly religious Afrikaner rule, we still have censorship, controlled by a handful of people who assume that they can impose their views on the rest of the population.
That means our intellectual freedom is still on shaky ground. For instance, just last year artist Brett Murray’s painting of President Jacob Zuma was defaced by two men who regarded it as an insult to a revered leader. I can’t see much difference between that act of vandalism and the attempt to vandalise Of Good
Report by closing it down. The good news is that there are many keen South African artists, actors, filmmakers and TV channels that can open closed minds.