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.