32nd Durban International Film Festival

DURBAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
21 - 31 July 2011

The 32nd Durban International Film Festival, supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (principal funder), National Film and Video Foundation, the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Economic Development and Tourism and other valued funders and partners, kicks off on 21 July with the World Premiere of the South African film Otelo Burning, directed by Sara Blecher. Set during the last days of apartheid, the Durban-shot film tells the story of a group of South African township youngsters who discover surfing as an empowering escape from the political violence of the times. There is drama, romance, rivalry, and tragedy in this convincing fulfilment of local filmmaking potential.

Between the 21st and 31st of July, the festival will be crammed with great films from around the world. Skoonheid, Oliver Hermanus’s groundbreaking film that caused a stir at the recent Cannes film festival, will have its first South African screening at the festival. DIFF will also present the World Premieres of Charlie Vundla’s noir film How To Steal 2 Million, John Barker’s thrilling heist flick 31 Million Reasons, Faith Isiakpere’s crime drama The Algiers Murders, Eldorado by new talents Shaldon Ferris and Lorreal Ferris, the hilarious comedy Taka Takata by Damir Radonic, and The Dream by Zuko Nodada. Making their African Premieres are Mukunda Michael Dewil’s psychological thriller Retribution and Paula van der Oest’s moving film about Ingrid Jonker, Black Butterflies.

DIFF 2011 includes the African Premiere of the year’s most anticipated film - Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life, which just won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Other highlights include Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, which will close the festival, Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena, Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad 2 - The Enemy Within, Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage, Michel Ocelot’s Tales Of The Night, SJ Clarkson’s Toast, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

African cinema will also be well-represented by Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s striking and unique Viva Riva!, Nigerian director Andrew Donsunmu’s visually beautiful Restless City, Justin Chadwick’s uplifting Kenya-set film The First Grader, and Ebrahim El Batout’s Hawi which first appeared in Durban as a project at the inaugural Durban FilmMart in 2010.

DIFF will focus on two national cinemas this year: India and Canada. Six films from the great Indian master Satyajit Ray will be presented, alongside daring new works by talented new Indian filmmakers. Leena Manimekelai will present the World Premiere of her film The Dead Sea and other Indian films include Onir’s I Am, Sanjoy Nag’s Memories In March, Kaushik Mukherjee’s Bengali hip hop film Asshole, and Aamir Bashir’s Autumn.

In a very strong year for Canadian cinema, DIFF will present Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated Incendies, the gritty drama Jo For Jonathan, Ed Gass-Donnelly’s Small Town Murder Songs, Xavier Dolan’s ravishing Heartbeats, and the quirky Familiar Ground by Stephane Lafleur. Canadian documentaries include Barry Steven’s Prosecutor, a fascinating look at the International Criminal Court, and Shannon Walsh’s St. Henri, The 26th Of August.

Germany is also well-represented at DIFF 2011 with Tom Tykwer’s Three, Pia Marais’ At Ellen’s Age, Ulrich Kohler’s Sleeping Sickness and the stunning documentary El Bulli - Cooking In Progress by Gereon Wetzel.

Local stories in the powerful documentary line-up include World Premieres such as Ryley Grunewald’s The Dawn of a New Day where healing is shown as being more than skin deep, Mickey Dube’s Sobukwe, A Great Soul about one of this country’s most influential, but unsung, heroes, the Keith Jones/Deon Maas music revolution collaboration Punk In Africa, and the Dara Kell/Chris Nizza collaboration Dear Mandela about innovative leadership emerging in informal settlements. Not to be missed, DIFF will present the African premiere of Mama Africa, the inspirational film about Miriam Makeba.

With the COP conference on climate change taking place in Durban later in the year, an exceptional range of conscientising environmental films is included in this year’s Eco-Lens focus. There is heated Irish village resistance to Shell in The Pipe; Blood in the Mobile shows how frightening mining conditions in the DRC produce material for our cellphones; and, fresh from Cannes, The Big Fix exposes corruption and cover-ups surrounding the Mexican Gulf oil spill. Countdown to Zero (by Lucy Walker whose Waste Land won big awards in 2010) is about nuclear weapons and challenges to disarmament, while Into Eternity covers nuclear waste storage. Eco-Pirate-the Story of Paul Watson is about this legendary defender of our oceans and its creatures (Paul Watson will attend the festival).

The riveting Sing Your Song is the story of Harry Belafonte from his music and film career to his involvement in civil rights and anti-apartheid movements. A special highlight will be Leonard Retel-Helmrich’s tracking of an Indonesian family in Position Among the Stars. This masterful film won top awards at both Sundance and IDFA.

Look out also for King Naki, a beautiful story of struggle and achievement set around horse-racing in the rural Transkei, the Cape Town film The Imam and I, and the Durban-shot Street Kids United.

The global financial meltdown is the focus of the 2011 Academy Award winning Inside Job, while John Pilger’s biting The War You Don’t See is a timely investigation into the media’s role in war. Other documentaries cover Bollywood, Robert Mugabe, the Black Power movement in America, organic agriculture, paraplegic musicians in Kinshasa, and West Indian cricket. Packages of short documentaries and short films are also on offer.

Opening with an outdoor screening on the beachfront on 24th July, DIFF will host the Wavescapes Surf Film Festival for the 7th consecutive year - a six-day blast of red-hot wave action, surf stories and groundbreaking cinematography.

FILM INDUSTRY WORKSHOPS

The Durban International Film Festival has become a valued meeting point for filmmakers and industry professionals, local and international, and the seminar and workshop programme is populated with leading experts offering insight and debate on a range of relevant issues. Talent Campus Durban is an intensive five-day programme bringing together nearly 50 African filmmakers from 16 countries on the continent. Durban FilmMart, a partnership with the Durban Film Office, not only facilitates opportunities for African projects selected for meetings with international financiers and potential co-producers, but also provides a seminar and master class programme for registered DFM delegates. 2011 marks the 10th year of DIFF’s partnership with University of KwaZulu-Natal’s AV unit who run the workshop programme for first-time filmmakers from community organizations. There are also a number of presentations by the National Film and Video Foundation.

Special events running conjunctively with DIFF include an exhibition of Bollywood paintings by Ranjit Dahiya, organized in association with Alliance Francaise, and performances by Grammy-nominated Debashish Bhattacharya, a leading exponent of the chaturangui (Indian slide-guitar).

Festival screenings will take place at Nu Metro Cinecentre Suncoast, Ster Kinekor Musgrave, Cinema Nouveau Gateway, the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, Ekhaya KwaMashu, The Royal Hotel, Luthuli Museum (Groutville) and other venues.

The Durban International Film Festival is organised by the Centre For Creative Arts (University of KwaZulu-Natal) with support by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (principal funder), National Film and Video Foundation, KwaZulu-Natal Department of Economic Development and Tourism, HIVOS, City Of Durban, German Embassy of South Africa, Goethe Institut of South Africa, Industrial Development Corporation and a range of other valued partners.

DURBAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2011
PROGRAMME / CALENDAR

DURBAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
21 - 31 July 2011 

DIFF 2011 WELCOME AND FOCUS AREAS
FEATURE FILM SYNOPSIS
SATYAJIT RAY RETROSPECTIVE
DOCUMENTARY AND SHORT DOCUMENTARY SYNOPSIS
SHORT FILM SYNOPSIS
WAVESCAPE SURF FILM SYNOPSIS
WORKSHOPS AND SPECIAL EVENT PROGRAMME

Solo

 SUBMISSION FOR THE 2010 DURBAN SHORT FILM CHALLENGE

SOLO is a 5 minute film that details the first day in the life of an exploratory android sent to explore a potentially habitable planet for the sake of humankind’s survival. But he’s not the only one. Hundreds of other androids have been sent to different planets. Humans will choose only one planet to inhabit. The rest of the androids are doomed to wander alone, hoping that, one day, they will meet their creators.

SOLO was made as part of the Durban Short Film Challenge, which is associated with the Durban International Film Festival, South Africa’s premiere film event. The name pretty much says it all. It’s a challenge. While making a short film is always tough, making a short film on no budget in three weeks with a small crew is truly a mental and physical feat. But we loved every minute of it.

As it happened, this film ended up being something of an experiment. While we would have preferred to go about it in a more orthodox way, time constraints caused us to go about making the film in a somewhat back-to-front way. It was a bit of a gamble, but in the end, we were very pleased with what we produced.

We dedicated a week to each phase of the production process. The first week was for scripting, the second for shooting and the third for post. However, after the first week, we hadn’t managed to lock down a final script. The idea was there, but it’s resolution was unclear. So basically, we ended up going out to shoot the initial scenes, without really knowing how the film was going to end.

While for a more formal or complex production, this could create a production management nightmare, the concept lent itself to the process, and ended up working in a really interesting, workshop-style way, where the dynamics of the scenes we had shot influenced our creative decisions in relation to the next ones. As a result, the film took on a kind of organic, naturally coherent life of its own, which surprised even ourselves, the filmmakers.

We knew initially that we wanted to make a science fiction film, as we hadn’t done it before. But we wanted to ensure that it still had an accessible, human emotional appeal. There were no shortage of ideas at first. But as soon as the idea popped up, we knew immediately that we wanted to make Solo. (The closest runner up was a neo-Wizard of Oz sci-fi starring Andrew’s schnauser, Edo.)

We needed the perfect person to play the part of the Android. Matt had Brad in mind, and as it turned out Brad, our star, happened, coincidentally, to be in town for the shooting period. Luck was on our side. We wanted Solo to be quite Aryan-looking, to give the impression of a new being, who’d never seen much sunlight before. So it seemed right that he should be almost albino in appearance. But Brad, a professional actor, with much at stake, was kind enough to let us have a go at his hair with peroxide. Et viola. We had our android.

At this point, we needed to start shooting. Script or not. We had scouted some locations, and had some of our exteriors set, but on our nonexistent budget, we had to get creative with our interior space-pod scene. After exploring a few other possible ideas, we eventually decided to shoot the pod scene in a Spur children’s play area, which was really awesome, mostly because exiting the set meant sliding down a corkscrew tunnel. We dressed it with some tubing and shot it really close up, and it came out looking pretty convincing, we think.

We chose our exterior locations based on how dramatic and untouched they seemed. We needed to create the impression of a world that was similar to ours, but not quite the same, and as yet untainted by human habitation. It needed to have an Eden-like new world feel to it. Our shoot took us all over the greater Durban area, as well as into the KwaZulu Natal Midlands. We are fortunate enough to live somewhere that has really beautiful, diverse landscapes quite close to each other. The shoot was quite pressurised, and we ended up chasing the sunlight, looking for new locations pretty much on the fly. Our final shot was found by trespassing on someone’s farm in the Midlands where we managed to set up a crane in record time to get the shot with literally seconds to spare.

We also had to traverse tiny cliff-face pathways carrying tracks (that we didn’t eventually use) down into the Kloof Gorge valley. We visited Cane Fields in Shongweni, and the Mangrove Swamps on the Umgeni river, the Botanical Gardens in Pietermaritzburg, and the beachfront in Durban.

We shot the scene with the butterfly in about four different locations. We literally had to smuggle some butterflies in a camera bag from a butterfly farm so that we could get the shot we needed in the right location. Guerilla filmmaking at its best. The poor silkworms stars you see in this scene were tragically massacred by an army of ants when we tried to set them free after we’d finished with them. It was really awful.

Once we’d got all our shots, we started cutting with a week till the deadline. The edit involved many late nights, mostly at Andrew’s house while his folks were away, sustaining ourselves on pizza and coffee. I got my first taste of the new Simba Vetkoek and Polony flavoured chips during this time. I don’t recommend them. It all started slowly coming together, editing, recording voice over under a duvet, being distracted by YouTube, working on CGI, writing the score, mixing etc etc until, after one week (including 2 entire nights without sleep,) we managed to finish it off. And here it is… watch the video at the top of this post.

PS. Thanks to all the crew who made it happen : Matt, Andrew, Badger, Brad, Luke, Mark, Pascal, Shanelle, and anyone else who lent us a hand. Shot.

SOLO Crew
Director	Matt Nefdt, Sarah Dawson	Editors	Matt Nefdt, Sarah Dawson
Producer	Matt Nefdt, Sarah Dawson	Music	Andrew Sutherland
Concept	Matt Nefdt, Sarah Dawson, Andrew Sutherland	Visual Effects	Andrew Sutherland, Matt Nefdt
Cinematography	Sarah Dawson	Crane Operator	Devin Carter
Voice of Android No. 278	Devin Carter	Additional Crane Operator	Matt Nefdt
Android No. 278	Brad Backhouse	Gaffer/Grip	Luke Mason
Location/Production Assistant	Pascal Bennett