Brian Little & Hunter Kennedy

The Fly on the Wall film Fokofpolisiekar: Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do, was named Best South African Documentary at Encounters, after opening to sell-out screenings and adding an extra show to meet demand. Ster-Kinekor released the feature-length documentary at cinemas in September 2009.

Directed by Brian Little, the documentary follows the rise of the controversial Afrikaans punk band. Comprising Hunter Kennedy, Francois Van Coke, Johnny De Ridder, Wynand Myburgh, and Jaco Venter, Fokofpolisiekar transformed the local music scene and, arguably, their own generation. In the beginning, the idea of starting a punk Afrikaans band was laughable,but the band’s don’t give-a-damn attitude cemented their success and won the hearts of the Afrikaaner youth who struggled to find their own identity in post-Apartheid South Africa. Brian says, “There is incredible energy at their shows. When you look at the fan’s faces, and their reactions to the live performances you can’t help but think there must be more to it, something underlying the fanaticism.”

The director professes to be a fan of the band, although he can’t explain why. “I’m English so I had to get all the lyrics translated. For me, it’s purely intuitive.” Bryan believes the band’s lyrics were key to their success. “The lyrics really did it. For the first time someone had the courage to say what the youth were feeling and give them a voice. The lyrics are brutally honest. In many ways Fokofpolisiekar are anti-establishment, but they also very personal.”

Lyricist Hunter Kennedy liked the film, although he confesses he finds it somewhat amusing. “It’s hard to judge it objectively. We look like total tits. The film wasn’t our idea. We just thought it would be cool if we could be in a movie! It tells our story. Maybe we don’t have to do this anymore. We can just tell someone to watch the film.” he laughs.

The self-funded documentary started out as a short project but ended up taking two-and-a-half years to complete. Brian says, “We just kept on finding so many layers to the band, and so much depth.” Brian and the crew followed the band as they performed nearly 150 shows in one year. “They live a crazy Afrikaaner lifestyle. These guys sometimes pull off two shows a day, and then have a big party. They have no concept of tomorrow. It’s pretty crazy.”

At the beginning of filming Brian struck a deal with photographer Liam Lynch. “We were at Liam’s exhibition in Pretoria and I realised that no one has captured the band quite like he has. He captures the power of their live shows just brilliantly. We used his work exclusively in the film and were able to access his archive of nearly 40 000 images.”

Brian says filming was total chaos. “The live shows were filmed using 16mm Bolex in low light and we used normal HD for the interviews.” In contrast, the Kirstenbosch concert needed six cameras and cranes to get the necessary shots. Grant Appleton was the DOP. “The film was a lot more intimate than people get to see of the band. Like Liam, we chronicled everything that they had been through, and not only the high moments. This is their mad journey to be professional musicians.”

The film ends with the band taking a break, which is ironically the point where filming started. The ending leaves the future of the band in question. The band members are currently more focused on projects like van Coke Cartel, aKing and Die Heuwels Fantasties, but since the documentary’s release at Encounters, Fokofpolisekar has played in Cape Town and Pretoria, as well at the Oppikoppi festival, dispelling rumours that it’s disbanding. One thing is certain, young South Africans have taken to Fokofpolisiekar like sticky gum to the back of an All Star shoe.

The documentary had an impressive start at Encounters. Brian says, “We knew we had an audience for this film and that we had to live up to that. All our four screenings were sold out even before Encounters opened. I think people got a lot more than what they expected to see.” Fokofpolisiekar, Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do has garnered a lot of international interest and will be screened at the next Sundance Film Festival and at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

Fly on The Wall is a South African film making collective founded in 2004. The company started out by making music videos and short films before capturing the attention of MTV International.

Sally Fink

This article first appeared in The Callsheet.

Christopher Lee dos Santos - director of Eternity

There’s little doubt that audiences love vampires. Think back to 1987’s Lost Boys starring Kiefer Sutherland as the eternal bad-boy David, which became an instant cult classic.

Since then we’ve seen hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Interview with a Vampire, Blade, and more recently Underworld and Twilight, topping the blockbuster lists, and re-igniting the world’s bloodlust for vampires. It was only a matter of time before South Africa produced its own version. Eternity is a love story about Billy (Andre Frauenstein), a vampire who falls in love with a human, Jenny (Rikki Brest).

If we’ve learnt anything from the genre, it’s that paranormal love stories are never simple. Jenny’s father (Ian Roberts) stumbles upon a serum that will allow vampires to walk in the sun, which causes an almost Nongquwusa-level rift among the vampire clans – separating them into those who want to walk in the sun and those who don’t. Debut director Christopher-Lee dos Santos says he wanted to break away from a stereotypical South African movie with his first film. “Making a vampire film allowed us to enter a stylistic world with a certain set of visual elements that I’ve always wanted to play with. It’s fast, it’s gritty, it’s exciting and it’s never been done before in South Africa.”

He says Eternity has everything audiences would expect from the genre. What makes it different is the Jozi setting, as well as the completely South African cast. “A highlight for me was working with the actors. The first night I had to direct David James, who had just done District 9, and we hadn’t had a chance to talk about his character. As a firsttime director, it was a surreal experience having to call him aside and say I didn’t believe the character he was portraying. He asked me what I wanted and in the next take he blew my mind. It was also inspiring to work with Ian Roberts. When I first started out in the industry, I said to myself: ‘One day I will work with that guy,’” he says.

The film also stars Christina Storm (Jakhalsdans), Hlomla Dandala (Isidingo), Gys de Villiers (Binnelanders) and Emmanuel Castis (Isidingo). Costume designer Nicolene van der Westhuizen and freelance make-up artist Karen Bezuidenhout transformed the stars into nightmarish blood suckers. Eternity is set in inner-city Johannesburg, which producer Anton Ernst (Surviving Evil, Jakhalsdans) says was perfect. “The idea came from sitting and looking at the city of Johannesburg and thinking, ‘What if there was a world inside the city, in the shadows of the underworld that we don’t really know about?’ Johannesburg is the South African equivalent of New York – the city that never sleeps. It plays perfectly into the vampire lifestyle, where we have characters that can only come out at night,” he says.

The producer says a lot of the film was shot in the inner city and Soweto. “We found an abandoned power plant in Soweto, which was like a R25 million film studio. There was so much space and so many layers to it.”
Joburg may have been perfect in many ways but in the middle of winter it was pure hell. “Last year’s May and June was exceptionally cold. We were shooting in temperatures of minus five and six degrees, which was not only uncomfortable but also extremely dangerous.”

Another challenge was the American investors pulling out. “Wehad to put a lot of our own money in and look to the dti rebate and product placement,” says Anton. The film was shot on three Canon 7Ds, which Christopher-Lee says proved advantageous for night time shoots. “The camera pulls in a lot of light and sometimes the camera can see what the human eye can’t. It really helped us a lot.”

He points out that George Lucas is shooting his latest project on a Canon 7D, adding weight to the old adage that size doesn’t matter, it’s how you use it that counts. Despite the fact that the film is ostensibly a love story that hopes to appeal to the teenage market, Christopher- Lee says it’s not Twilight. “Yes it’s a vampire love story but it’s also more than that. I tried to add some Blade influences, so in actual fact it’s a cross between the two. On set we called it Blade Lite.”

And in case you were thinking it, the similarity of the director’s name to the one-time Dracula has nothing to do with his wanting to make a vampire movie. “I didn’t make the connection myself. It was only when my mother called me and pointed it out that I had good laugh about it.”

Christopher-Lee and Anton recently jetted off to Los Angeles for The American Film Mart, where they hope the film will create some interest overseas. Indi-genous Film Distribution will release Eternity nationally on 23 December 2010.

This article first appeared in The Callsheet.

Alastair Orr - director of The Unforgiving

The Unforgiving is more than just a horror. It’s South Africa’s first splatter film. Like Saw, it focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and violence, and pardon the pun, is unforgiving of its graphic content. Writer and director Alastair Orr from Pro Cut Productions makes his debut with the film. “As a filmmaker you can only make what you enjoy and then hope that other people enjoy it too. I really love this genre. It allows you to work with minimal cast and crew and tons of blood,” he says. The film opens through Indi-genous Films on 13 August 2010.

“The Unforgiving is a relentless investigation of suffering, murder and corruption told from a variety of points of view,” says Helen Kuun, CEO of Indi-genous Film Distribution. “It’s an exciting foray into a genre that is new for local filmmakers, but one that is hugely popular with audiences all over the world.” She uses Saw as an example, which was made for $1.2 million, but grossed over $100 million worldwide. Similarly Hostel cost less than $5 million to produce and grossed over $80 million.

The Unforgiving tells the story of two survivors, played by Ryan Macquet and Claire Opperman, who are the only links authorities have to a spate of attacks committed by one of the most grotesque serial killers imaginable in rural South Africa.

Ryan had the dual role of lead actor and producer of the film. When they left AFDA, he and Alastair worked together on a 22-minute pilot episode of a television series called Dante. The show was never sold but it did leave the pair with a thirst for independent filmmaking. He and Ryan came up with the idea of the film in 2008 and Alastair developed the script in two months. He pitched it to producer Lorika Boshoff from Illusionz Unlimited Entertainment, who loved it.

Alastair says he grew sick of people complaining about the state of the South African film industry. “I got tired of being told by industry players that we couldn’t make a film because we were too young. So I took all my naivety and ambitions and put them on the page, and what came out was my fear. That’s what interested me, the fear I have as an average, young South African.”

The Unforgiving was shot over eight weekends from March 2009 to the first week of June 2009. “The big advantage of shooting over weekends was that we could edit during the week. This way we were constantly able to monitor our progress and re-shoot if necessary. The script evolved as things on set changed,” says Alastair. He describes his skeleton crew as “various HODs and a couple of film school assistants who wanted to learn how to make films in the real world and not the way they’re taught to.”

The shoot itself was organised chaos. “I loved the spontaneity of the way we filmed. Guerrilla style. We didn’t have money so we made it work. It evolved in front of us into something none of us could ever have imagined. All your planning can go out the window when there’s a thunderstorm and you’re shooting outside. When the sun is setting and the storyboard says you’ve got ten shots but you’ve only got time for two. That’s the part I loved. We made it work,” he says.

The team chose the location of Voslorus in the East Rand. “It’s a place where there are all these abandoned farms. It just really looks like the place where this kind of thing could happen,” reflects Alastair. The director is adamant that there is no social commentary in the film. “It’s pure entertainment, but a percentage of the profits will go to a rape and trauma support initiative.”

The Unforgiving was shot on the HVX200, a P2 camera from Panasonic, which gave the film its characteristic grainy feel. “The DVCPRO HD Codec is so robust that it could handle the way I put multiple grades on the footage without breaking up. We also shot with a 1/1000 of a shutter to amplify the frenzied state of the characters. The film looks and feels very different to what other South African films look and feel like and that’s really because of Craig Maarschalk, our DOP. He shot the thing like a madman, chaining the camera up, smacking it, covering it in blood - the camera really is another character in the film.”

Splatter films portray images society considers shocking, a combination of graphic violence and sexually suggestive imagery. There is also an emphasis on visuals, style and technique, including hyperactive camera work. Alastair is very aware that his film is uncomfortable to watch. “It’s reality, but it’s heightened. Everything’s more extreme, more intense, harsher than the real world. When you look at the film you must never think that you want to be there with these people. This isn’t James Bond,” he says.

But despite the fact that squeamish audiences might not like it, Alastair is proud of his first film. “There are a few things to bear in mind: It’s my first film; I completed it when I was 24; I have worked with some of the best companies in the industry like Waterfront Post and Indi-genous Film Distribution; and it has a theatrical release. Whether the film works or not, I’ve achieved what I set out to do.”

This article first appeared in The Callsheet Newspaper

Claire Angelique

I call Claire Angelique at seven PM sharp. She's wary of phone calls for good reason. The self-confessed supernova beauty is the first female director to win the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for film for her debut feature film My Black Little Heart which was produced by Lars von Trier's company Zentropa Films. If that's not impressive enough, the cinematographer on the movie was Anthony Dod Mantle, whose credits include the Academy award winning Slumdog Millionaire. 

My Black Little Heart follows a heroin addict through the seedy back streets of Durban and into the dark world of Internet porn. Audiences have had mixed reactions - there were walkouts at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival. But critics have loved it. Indie filmmaker and novelist Aryan Kaganof called it "the most powerful South African film to date." In the film, Claire plays the leading role of Chloe because "no other actresses quite had the stomach for the part." She also has a background in dancing.

Claire the director was almost Claire the ballerina, after pursuing a dream of professional dancing after school. She fell in love with the camera while video recording her choreography routines and joined the Cape Town International Film School in 2002. Her headmaster was so impressed with her short film, Solid Waste, The diaries of, that he sent it to the Berlinale Film Festival and soon after the young filmmaker was jetting off to Cannes. This is where the story gets a little unbelievable. "I emailed Zentropa Films after failing to meet them at Cannes. I have always been a fan of Lars von Trier's work and they asked me to send some samples of my work and a few weeks later accepted the project. I firmly believe that people who do similar work are drawn to each other." Once described by a journalist as a romantic, Claire believes that things happen for a reason and when the producers asked her who she wanted as cinematographer she replied, "someone like Anthony Dod Mantle." She never expected the stoic response, "Why don't you send him the script?", nor his excited request to meet her two weeks later. They met over lunch at the Mandala Hotel in Berlin and "felt like old friends." 

It reads like a fairytale for any young South African filmmaker, but Claire Angelique is a director with a tenacious spirit who is determined to make films her own way and who refuses to compromise on content. "I want to make gritty, fatty films," she says. Claire describes herself as a patriot of nu cinema, a director who thinks differently to the so-called traditional South African discourse. The young director explains, “Because I live in a completely romanticised dream world half the time my subject matter and way of writing is based on scenarios made popular by Victorian English literature, also by artists like Baudelaire or Gaultier, where the dregs and hidden cantonments of society’s miscreants hang out. I’ve always been attracted to the inner goings on of the city.” This thinking translates into stark, uneasy films; certainly not something most South African audiences raised on a diet of Leon Schuster would be comfortable watching.

Her next project, Palace of Bone, is equally dark. Also set in Durban the film will feature prostitutes, strip clubs, drug dealers and Edith Venter. "I want to write a new scene that will feature a real Palace of Bone," exclaims Claire gleefully. All of her characters are based on real people, characters that audiences will not have seen in cinemas before. "There was a quote in the Big Issue that said 'be part of the people'. I draw inspiration from being involved in life at all levels. You have to make the best of your bad points."

Claire has launched an aggressive Facebook campaign to secure funding for her film which earned R20 000 in the first four days.  Palace of Bone will premiere at the 2010 Grahamstown National Arts Festival which runs from 20 June to 02 Jul 2010. 

My Black Little Heart will screen in London in May.

This article first appeared in Dazed & Confused.

Henry Rollins

Sid Vicious may not agree but in my mind, Henry Rollins is the god of punk.

Fifty year old Rollins has seen and done it all. Back in the eighties he was the vocalist for hardcore punk outfit Black Flag, followed by The Rollins Band in the nineties. Now he tours the world as a spoken word artist with brief appearances in television shows such as Kurt Sutter's Sons of Anarchy.

He also visits as many countries as possible, making him a person of interest for America's Department of Homeland Security. This is entirely intentional. Rollins loves the fact that he pisses off the powers that be, and tries to spend as little time in his own country as possible. "When I'm not travelling I'm looking for destinations to travel to," says the man who can't visit an airport without receiving a full body search.

Rollins was recently in South Africa as part of his Frequent Flyer spoken word tour. This is the second time he's performed in the country and it will probably not be the last. Rollins says "it’s really cool" having an audience in South Africa and that's all that's required to get him to come on tour.

"I include South Africa for the same reason I tour in Germany, Canada, etc. It's a place that I can go where the audiences are great. The highlight for me was the shows themselves."
From his response it's clear that Rollins is happiest when he has a place to speak his mind, and boy, does he love to hear himself speak. His show at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town lasted three hours, without him once stopping to take a sip of water.

Rollins made it clear at his show that he loves South Africa but he has some advice for the fledgling democracy. "I think South Africans should maintain their path and keep emerging from the previous several decades of history."

Rock on.

Sharlto Copley

Nu-Metro released Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team on 20 August 2010. The big-budget Hollywood remake of the 1980s cult television show, follows four army rangers who try to clear their names after being imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit.


The film stars South Africa’s very own Sharlto Copley (District 9) as H.M (Howling Mad) Murdock alongside a star-studded cast of Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Jessica Biel. The A-list line up had been confirmed early on, with the exception of the notoriously nutty Murdock.


When District 9 came out, Sharlto caught the eye of producer Jules Daly, who thought he’d be the perfect fit for the role. Jules runs Ridley Scott’s commercials company RSA, which represents Neill Blomkamp, the South African director of District 9. “I got a call from Neill who said the executive producer of The A-Team, Ridley Scott, wanted to get in touch with me for the role,” recalls Sharlto.


But it wasn’t the chance to work with the legendary producer and director that swayed him. “I’ve never pursued acting roles before but I really wanted to play Murdock. The A-Team was my favorite show as a kid and Murdock was my favorite character,” he says. “So to play him was like a dream come true.”

One thing that struck him abo-ut the script was that Murdock was very conservative, a far cry from the original television character. “I needed to show Joe Carnahan what I thought before I met him, which would either get me closer to getting the role or exclude me completely,” says Sharlto. He recorded an eight-minute video in his Austin, Texas hotel suite, improvising all the things that could go wrong for Murdock in a hotel room. He sent this to the director. “I pushed the boundaries as much as I could. I improvised Murdock being stuck in the bathroom, calling BA in the next room for assistance, but BA doesn’t want to help. They end up having an altercation on the hotel phone. I also copied the original Murdock, who had an invisible dog who followed him around. I took my dog to an army therapist because I thought he was racist. It keeps barking at BA.”


Not only did the video secure him the role, but it also cemented a great working relationship with the director. “Joe embraced improv, which was important to me. He would always throw out ideas for me to try out. 70% of the film was improvised. Bradley and Quinton were into it too, but a lot of their stuff didn’t make it into the film.” One scene that did make it in was a cheeky tribute to South Africa. “I’m always looking for little gaps and South African characters I can maybe try and do, even in Hollywood blockbuster movies,” he says.


Sharlto plays a pilot who gets released from a psychiatric hospital and reinstated into the army. The role sees him flying helicopters and setting his cast mates on fire. “I was very grateful Joe didn’t ask me to do my own stunts. During the scene where Murdock gets shocked by a car battery and flips onto the bonnet, the stuntmen cracked open his skull and had to have eight stitches in his head. I freaked out because I thought he was unconscious.""My experience of this film was having stuntmen who actually helped deliver my character to the audience, and not just fly into walls, which is rare,” says Sharlto.


A stickler for realism, Joe sought out the services of Paul Maurice, a military advisor with extensive wartime experience, to train the cast in the use of a wide array of weapons and turn the actors into a Special Forces unit. “Joe really wanted us to know what we were doing so he could shoot the scene and not have to make quick cuts. He wanted it to look real and for the four of us to really function like a team,” explains Sharlto. “When you’re being trained by a guy who’s literally going off and coming back wounded from Afghanistan, it makes you think a little more about what you’re doing and what would actually be involved; it brings it close to home, that you are portraying a glamorised version of what real guys are doing on a daily basis. So we all felt it was important to respect that and be as accurate as possible.”

It was Sharlto’s idea to give his character a Southern accent. “Sharlto has a definite South African accent, but there’s not a shred of this in the movie,” says Joe. “He’s doing this Texas Panhandle twang that is really something. You just can’t exhaust his imagination in terms of what he will give you. His whole attitude was that Murdock is nuts, so Sharlto had to be a bit nuts, changing his personality at the drop of a hat.”

Sharlto says there’s a whole technical side to accents and dialects that very few people actually understand.
“It’s like a science. If you understand phonetics, you can make an accent accurate to a particular region. Murdock’s base voice is a non-specific southern dialect. I used an accent coach, Jess Platt, at the end of the film because I wanted to technically accurate. We listened to every single line and if it wasn’t technically accurate, we’d change it with voice over,” he says.


Liam Neeson plays the leader of The A-Team, cigar-smoking colonel John “Hannibal” Smith. He and Sharlto formed a close bond during the publicity tour, when the team spent weeks getting to know each other properly, but during the first days on set it was a different story altogether. “The scale of this movie was huge. It was completely overwhelming. I was really intimidated meeting some of the actors; realising you’re just about to do a scene with Liam Neeson is surreal,” says Sharlto.

Before District 9 became a worldwide hit, Sharlto was mostly known as the go-to-guy at Cape Town-based Atomic Visual Effects, but he’s taken to acting like a duck to water. “In some ways I am surprised by my success but in a weird way it feels natural and right. I acted a lot when I was a kid and considered being an actor at that point. I’ve had a passion for movies for such a long time that to meet the people I’m meeting now feels like it was always going to happen.”

The A-Team made just under $77 million in the United States and has already nearly made as much in the rest of the world.


Sharlto is represented by William Morris Endeavour.

This article first appeared in The Callsheet Newspaper.