FESTIVAL
Films from us, to us
It’s been a whirlwind few years for director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka since his second feature, 2013’s Of Good Report, caused controversy and was briefly “banned” by the Film and Publications Board. The film — a black and white, low-on-dialogue story of a murderous teacher — went on to win several awards and in 2014 Qubeka won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Film. He then travelled to London, got himself an agent and started to develop several international projects on the back of the buzz he’d achieved with Of Good Report but, as they often do, most of those fell through. If anything, the director says that his experiences overseas “affirmed home for me and made me realise that I needed to work from home”.
For his latest film, Sew the Winter to My Skin
— which will open the inaugural Cape Town International Film Market and Festival next week and has just been selected as SA’s official submission for the Oscars — Qubeka returned to his native Eastern Cape to tell the story of apartheid-era Robin Hood legend and stock thief John Kepe.
It’s a story he became aware of when, as a teenager, he went to live with his mother in the small town of Somerset East. As Qubeka recalls: “I was walking through the museum one day and I came across this article about Kepe. What I saw was this picture of Kepe being led from the court in chains and what grabbed me was that he had this kind of swag about him and I wondered where does a black man in
1952 get that swag from?”
The only answer he could arrive at “was that it came from his ancestors and that Kepe [who called himself the ‘Samson of the Boschberg’] saw himself as a prophet”.
POSSE HUNT
Sew the Winter is a beautifully shot period tale that tells the story of the hunt for Kepe by a local farmer and Ossewabrandwag General Helmut Botha and his posse. It’s a freewheeling narrative that jumps around in time and presents not so much a biopic as a series of scenes and interpretations of the life of its protagonist, which offers thoughtful meditation on issues of land and mythmaking between then and now, against a landscape that has seen so much historical confrontation between various groups in SA.
Qubeka acknowledges he may be asking a lot of audiences in the hyper-opinionated, sound-byte era of Twitter to appreciate a twohour, mostly silent, historical epic. But he hopes his injection of dark humour and a belief that
“if viewers come away with multiple interpretations, that’s great”, will help.
As a director Qubeka admits that he’s a “manipulator”.
“I try to find as many things to make you engage as possible and get it so the idea of using silence and pushing the image to tell the story is definitely a thing that does that. The other thing is that I love intrigue and I like to create suspense.”
While this film may not have quotable dialogue as takeaways for viewers, Qubeka’s next film, Knuckle City, a boxing tale set in Mdantsane in East London is “the complete antithesis and I’ve used language as much as possible. It’s a much more Scorsese kind of piece.”
The Cape Town Film Market and Festival is the first major industry and audience festival of its kind in the Mother City since the demise of the Sitengi Film and Television Market several years ago. It will bring together industry professionals from the Global South for six days of workshops and programmes that Film Market Programme director Elias Ribeiro will use “to create a more vibrant environment for our community”.
Ribeiro, who is from Brazil but has lived in SA for eight years, has produced five features during his time here, including John Trengove’s controversial The Wound, which just failed to make the shortlist for this year’s Foreign Language Oscar nominations. He says that while the task of compiling the Film Market programme has been “daunting … especially with regard to having to negotiate the interests of so many filmmakers in a divided community”, he maintains a “belief in the nation-building power of cinema”.
Ribeiro hopes the various discussions and interactions between filmmakers from across the Global South will ensure that the festival continues to go from strength to strength over the next few years and produce outcomes that will benefit not just the local industry but also those in other African countries and Latin America.
It’s a goal that reflects his feeling that “through cinema we can work a lot of shit out and get to a better place and I hope that the industry programme will help South African and other filmmakers come together.”
The Cape Town International Film Market and Festival takes place at the V&A Waterfront from October 10-19. Visit www.filmfestival.capetown
Public tickets to the gala opening night screening of Sew the Winter to My Skin on October 9 are available through www.computicket.co.za.