Discovering a world beyond her dreams
MULTI-AWARD-WINNING quartet, The Parlotones, have announced the second leg of their national tour. The rock band will be taking places like Welkom, Stellenbosch, Upington, Harrismith and as far afield as Botswana and Namibia by storm until the end of the month, before their European tour.
The concerts will be in support of their latest album, Antiques and Artefacts. Some of these shows will be dubbed The Parlotones Orchestrated when they will rock out with an eight-piece orchestra. Comprised of Kahn Morbee (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Neil Pauw (drums), Paul Hodgson (lead guitar, keyboard) and Glen Hodgson (bass guitar, piano), The Parlotones have become household names.
Recently, the group did a few screenings of their documentary, called This Is Our Story. The band turned the camera on themselves as they travelled the country (and abroad) and told the story of how they first got together, where they
Fwere headed and the people who helped them on this journey.
I spoke to founding member, Paul Hodgson, shortly after the Joburg screening of the documentary, and he was proud of their work. “It’s kind of something we always wanted to do,” he started. Although shorter doccies on the band have been produced for TV, this one only happened once director Michelle Pretorius expressed her desire to film the band on tour. When she was done, “she literally had a wall of terabyte discs” crammed full of footage.
The doccie also features footage that was taken by Pauw’s father – who also appears in the film. It’s endearing to see parents talk about their children and their dreams. And Morbee’s grandmother was a crowd favourite from the moment she appeared on the big screen.
Hodgson called these inclusions “enlightening”. He said: “Those inclusions were really Michelle’s call. She spent a lot of time with us and we’d often mention being in Neil’s parents’ garage or mention Kahn’s gran so she wanted to get OR YEARS now, Capetonian director Jenna Bass has been trying to make a feature called Toktokkie. Everyone who sees her script agrees it is good, but financing a large production is impossible when you have no sugar daddy or track record in making films.
Realising she had to get out of the vicious circle of no money, no film so no money, she hit on the idea of Love the One You Love.
Inspired by being of two minds when watching formulaic romantic comedies which dictates people have to hook up, she wanted to question the status quo.
At the Busan International Film Festival Q&A in South Korea last year, she was surprised that people weren’t as interested in the film-making process as they were in treating her as an agony aunt, asking her questions like “what is love?”
“And I think, if you’ve just seen the film, surely you don’t want my advice, because I’m very confused myself,” laughed Bass in an interview in Cape Town. “There’s a dedication at the end, their perspective.”
Another person whose perspective was included up to a point was The Parlotones’ former manager, Raphael Domalik. Over the years, the relationship between the band and ex-manager seemed to be acrimonious with various accusations flying from both ends. So it is a little disappointing that Domalik’s commentary just ends at a certain point and no explanation as to what happened between them follows.
“That’s something that was left out on purpose,” said Hodgson. “It’s like whenever something happens in the media then he gets mad, but everything is in the process of being resolved. We just felt it wasn’t necessary to put that in the movie or to speak about it in the press.”
The band hope to get the film onto DVD and are in talks to have it available on DStv’s Box Office. But for now, you can see them live and direct at a venue near you this spring. ‘to my family, my love is forever’, which is ironic because the film questions this idea of love as a thing that is forever. It is a call to look at the world around us with a little more clarity, rather than just take the messages that society, government and our country gives us. ‘You are living in a rainbow nation, you are supposed to seek out a soulmate.’ To critique these things more – that, if anything, is the message,” she said.
It takes months to put together a script, so Bass wrote characters and an outline, allowing the actors to improvise their dialogue. She wrote the Terry character for Chi Mendi (“she identified with the character as someone with a yearning to be someone and see the world”) and loved the way Louw Venter individualised his lonely techie character.
Some of the screen characters weren’t acting; they really are a sangoma or private investigator and the magic teacher in the film really was her magic teacher back in the day.
“If you do improv, you can only ask so much of people. It was a rich experience for the people who were actors because the world was so real.”
The film was shot guerilla-style around Cape Town in 2013 on a budget of R50 000 with an almost year-long edit – the first cut was five and a half hours long – but the National Film and Video Foundation came to the rescue with funding for the post-production process.
The 28-year-old handled the camera work herself. Bass loves small cameras and the freedom it gave her to get right into the actors’ space, though she always had this idea that she wanted to work on a huge shoot: “I used to want to be South Africa’s answer to Francis Ford Coppola and I’ve revised that. Essentially, whatever film-making I do, I want it to be a response to the environment I’m in. That’s the responsibility of any artist.
“You can’t just copy and paste what someone else has done. The film-making world is stuck in conventions and sometimes you can only access resources if you play by those rules.
“Now I’ve made a film and I feel that people can see what I do. I’d love to make films that don’t limit my imagination,” she said while admitting that she still wants to make a movie on a big set with lots of people and money.
For Love the One You Love she had to look at what she could do right now, and consider what she did have. The first thing she realised was that Cape Town offered a myriad possibilities.
“I could go crazy, I had this giant set. A lot of times, Cape Town films are subculture driven, so a film will be a Cape Flats movie or a township movie, and my experience of Cape Town has become much more diverse as I don’t just live in the suburbs, but in a city with all these parallel universes, which is something Toktokkie was about.
“That’s just my greatest inspiration… discovering this whole world beyond your dreams.”