Khalo Matabane’s first dramatic feature “State of Violence”, the opener at last month’s Durban International Film Festival, is a fascinating insight into a Johannesburg divided by wealth
and class, exploring issues of memory, denial, forgiveness and revenge. Andrew Worsdale looks at the film’s treatment of the city’s contradictions and its place in the development of Matabane’s unique cinematic voice.
Khalo Matabane is an auteur. His films reflect a singular, personal vision and, although driven by sociopolitical themes from the legacy of the struggles against apartheid to issues of xenophobia and the individual’s place in the new South Africa, his movies are never didactic agit-prop exercises. Matabane’s individualist style is always more interested in questioning different realities than providing clear-cut answers.
His feature-length documentary “Story of a Beautiful Country” redefined the notion of both road movie and documentary as he told the stories of ordinary people from the back of a minibus taxi.
His 2006 film “Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon” was a perceptive and compelling feature length docu-drama set in Joburg’s inner city that explored the lives of refugees and examined topics such as migration, displacement and Johannesburg’s new-found role as a haven for refugees from both Africa and the rest of the world. The film was named best South African film at that year’s Durban Fest and Won the Ecumenical Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
His four-part television series “When We Were Black” was a complex, intelligent and warm look at the innocence and naivety of people on the brink of adulthood in the midst of the seminal 1976 Soweto uprising.
I’ve hung out with Khalo, even did a spot of acting for a bread and butter TV show he directed, and his favourite comment when enthused about virtually anything is, “That’s really, really interesting.” Forever enquiring, looking between the lines in events or conversations, Matabane is a determined cineaste and a lover of both movies and polemic, making him, possibly, South Africa’s foremost intellectual filmmaker.
With his first feature-length fictional narrative, the analytical director chose to focus on themes of betrayal, revenge and the legacies of the past. As “State of Violence” producer Jeremy Nathan says of their development process: “Constantly Khalo watches films, from anywhere in the world, obsessively, texting ideas to his large group of socially networked friends, testing his political and storytelling thoughts to an initial virtual audience.”
Khalo approached Nathan’s Dv8 Films over five years ago with a rough outline and concept for a feature film about a comrade from the struggle for liberation who had risen from debilitating poverty to a position of great wealth in the new South Africa. “Key to the plot was the fact that our lead character, as an angry young kid in the 1980s fighting the apartheid regime, its police and soldiers, had killed a sellout in his own community – a policeman,” says the producer.
The scripting, casting and production process became part writing, with much debate and discussion, and part workshop with French screenwriter and script editor Jacques Akchoti, more input from various partners and funders and deep discussions with the cast and crew, led to an inclusive creative process that allowed for input from everyone on the team.
The film tells the story of Bobedi (Fana Mokoena), who, when his wife is killed, is forced to go in search of the killer. His search takes him out of his comfort zone in wealthy Sandton and back into Alexandra township, a place of buried memories. When he finds out that the killer is his own cousin, his dead uncle’s son, he is forced to deal with the family he left behind. Starring opposite Mokoena is Presley Chweneyagae, famous globally for his performance in “Tsotsi”, who plays the role of Boy-Boy.
They are joined by veteran actors Mary Twala, Vusi Kunene, Lindi Matshikiza, Tinah Mnumzana, Harriet Manamela and Neo Ntlatleng. “At the core of Khalo’s investigation was his deep desire to understand why violence is so embedded in our national psyche, how poverty, perpetual conflict and the long history of colonisation and apartheid have created a nation of extremely violent people, who continue to perpetrate acts of violence so easily,” says Nathan.
With his documentary background and constantly prying mind Matabane went about conceptualising the narrative for the film through an intense development process based on character which carried through into production.
“The way the film was shot was interesting because it was a collaborative effort and we all had freedom on set and the cast and heads of departments came with ideas,” he says.
“It was during this process that the story became even more intimate and I realised that the strength of the story was in the family dynamics. The film deals with themes of memory, denial, ideology versus family, the wealth of Sandton versus the poverty of Alexandra township in a subtle way. Is it better to remember or to forget? And when should we forget and when should we remember?”
In his director’s treatment for the film, prepared together with the script to attract finance, Matabane wrote: “The violent act that the main character, Bobedi, experiences, forces him to escape his comfort zone of his suburban life. Like me, he lives in a predominantly old Jewish neighborhood.
“He embarks on a journey into the underbelly of Johannesburg, a harsh and brutal landscape full of contradictions. The few exceptionally wealthy people who lock themselves in gated communities with security guards and electric fences provide a stark contrast to the rest of the population who are the wretched of the earth.
The dream of forging national reconciliation and a just and equitable society has failed and Johannesburg is a place of broken dreams where dog eats dog. It is a city of greed where money buys the characters almost anything except their souls.”
Despite these harsh words Khalo says: “The film does not judge or offer moral solutions, but rather it intends to provoke and leave an audience to make up their own minds about violence, especially in a world where the marginalised increasingly feel the need to resort to violence as an act of desperation to make themselves heard.”
After its Durban world premiere, online critic Roger Young described the film as “not a standard vigilante film, it’s more about a state of mind a stark, stripped down and affecting film about the numbness of revenge”.
Nathan says that what differentiates “State of Violence” from other South African films is that “it does not ever deal with simplistic racial violence. Uniquely, it focuses on the brutal affects of poverty and apartheid on the black family unit, and how this family unit has been devastated over time, its fragility sustained largely by women.
“By linking our behaviour in the present, to the consequences of our actions in the past, the film raises questions more than giving answers, about whether true forgiveness in a post colonial, post apartheid society, is actually really achievable.”
The powerful revenge thriller was shot in 30 days late last year, mostly in the poverty-stricken township of Alexandra, five minutes from Sandton, the wealthy heart of Johannesburg. The contrast between these two worlds – one unbelievably rich and modern, the other almost medieval in its poverty – is a metaphor for a man caught between his past and his present, who grew up in the grinding poverty of Alex, and who now lives the high life in Sandton.
These contrasts formed a fascinating visual conflict for the film. “The colours of Sandton before Bobedi’s wife dies are warm in contrast to being cold after she has been killed,” says the director. “Alexandra township colours are bleached and white, it’s hot, everything is grey and brown, a decaying brown of everything that is old. The colours accentuate the wealth in Sandton and the poverty in Alexandra township.”
The contrast was not only visual but aural as well. “The film does not use scored music but different sound designs,” says Matabane. “We hear the sound that he hears and sometimes it’s a sound that haunts him, like his wife sobbing before she dies or it’s a distorted sound.
“The sound of wealthy Sandton is different from the one in Alexandra township. The suburb is quiet except for the birds and dogs barking and alarms going off, while Alexandra is very loud – traffic, different musical styles, loud radios playing, taxis hooting.”
The film was a complex coproduction but the producers had to find partners sensitive to Matabane’s process as a director. Collaborators included the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), SABC, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Rebate, the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and the Gauteng Film Commission (GFC) in South Africa.
Nathan is full of praise for the GFC, saying: “They were and still are a powerful partner on the project, from preproduction through to distribution.”
Foreign support came from the French CNC’s Fonds Sud and Italy’s Unidea together with Diana Elbaum and Sebastien Delloye’s Liaison Cinematographique, the French coproducer, who also brought the sales company, Pyramide International, to the film.
Despite the complexities and the agendas that come with a coproduction like this the ever-reflective Khalo sighs and says: “It was important that I did my first fiction film with producers who understand the importance of bringing a directorial voice to the screen, and I think it is visible in this film.
“The themes that fascinate me – history, memory, religion and the process of filming, part conventional, part improvised. ‘Violence’ is a film in which I try to find my cinematic voice, one that is influenced by my growing up in a village with a strong oral traditional of story-telling, my experiences as a documentary filmmaker, my love for different genres of cinema, from different eras and continents and ideologies.
It is in the end a cinema of a film traveller and lover, one who likes to provoke with cinema. It is what I call the cinema of the dreamers.”
This particular dream of Matabane’s is about to infiltrate film festivals across the globe over the next few months, from Toronto to Pusan, Carthage and Dubai. It’s scheduled for a local release in March next year.