Conversations With Us All

Peter Machen speaks to director Khalo Matabane about his award-winning debut feature Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon.

Khalo Matabane’s first feature film Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon is a remarkable achievement. Making little distinction between notions of fiction and reality, the film tells the story of a young writer named Keniloe (Tony Kgoroge) who meets a Somali woman (Fatima Hersi) in a Johannesburg park on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Over the course of the next few weeks, this woman tells Keniloe of the terrible things that have happened to her to bring her to the City of Gold. But her narrative is cut short when one Sunday she fails to appear. And so Keniloe, who wants to write a story about her experiences, starts trawling through the streets of urban Johannesburg in search of this woman who has ignited something deep within him.

In the process, he comes into contact with immigrants and refugees from all over the world who have made their way to Johannesburg. We meet a woman from Yugoslavia who chronicles her heart-breaking decision to leave her country after years of seemingly endless war. An Asian woman tells of her exile from South Korea and of the racism she experiences in all sectors of South Africa. There is a British man who has come to this country for its promise of intellectual freedom and openness. A young catholic woman from Ethiopia describes her flight from her homeland to escape political and religious persecution. A ex-presidential guardsman from the former Congo describes how he survived a machete attack and fled to South Africa. A Palestinian family have been separated from their motherland for so long, they can no longer conceive of returning.

Some of these refugees have made their home in South Africa permanently and have come to feel at ease here. Others still feel rootless and itinerant, while others are only too aware that they are constantly at risk of being deported. It is this series of interviews that constitutes the core of the film and paints a portrait of contemporary South Africa that is very different to the one that has been painted by the artists and architects of nation building. The film vastly expands the spectrum of our rainbow nation while at the same time exploring the continuing national tendency to sharply delineate the colour differences within that spectrum

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The film is extraordinary on many levels, not the least being Matabane’s powerful and idiosyncratic aesthetic which frames the film, and which resonates with the best of contemporary fine art portraiture. That Matabane achieved so much with only R150 000 (an amount which approaches zero in film-making terms) doesn’t make his film any better, but it does offer massive encouragement to film-makers the world over and particularly in South Africa, where film resources are so scare. That his film has received such ardent critical praise, winning a slew of awards at festivals around the world, offers equal encouragement, proving that critical recognition does not necessarily require millions of dollars.

Elsewhere, Matabane has referred to his film as a love-letter to South Africa. But it is not the love-letter of initial infatuation. Rather it is a love letter that acknowledges a bitter-sweet South African reality that borders on schizophrenia. South Africa is presented as a country that does indeed offer both literal and metaphoric hope to the people of Africa and beyond. But while the country offers a global embrace, it is also a nation full of ingrained prejudices, institutional discrimination and xenophobia, which we see reflected through the eyes of these refugees and immigrants.

In a world that is increasingly defined by migration, Matabane’s film offers a rare dialogue between these fellow travellers. I spoke to Matabane about this breakthrough film.

Peter Machen: Hi Khalo. Your film might not have won an Oscar but it has received substantial international critical recognition at a level unprecedented in South African film. Yet Ster Kinekor are only releasing two copies of the print and I haven’t seen any media or hype regarding the film. Are you simply happy that they are distributing and showing the film or do you think that they should be doing a whole lot more?

Khalo Matabane: I think Helen from Ster Kinekor has been supportive of the film. I always think distributors can do more to promote the films. But I think the film is not fat-cat filmmaking.

PM: After the screening at the Durban International Film Festival, I asked – from a seat in the audience – how much of the film was acted? Your response implied that the question was irrelevant; that in a world where political fictions are presented as truths, notions of truth become arbitrary. I was only asking as a hypothetical film-maker. For me it is a point of interest more than it is relevant to the film’s content or meaning. But has this question about what is “real” in the film and what is not (and those are very large inverted commas) come up much as you have taken your film around the world, or do you think that audiences are getting used to more complex notions of truth?

KM: I think audiences are mainly used to Hollywood cinema. Conversations is a film that really does not concern itself with limitation of fact or fiction, imagined or real. In our daily experiences we all move between the real and unreal, conscious and subconscious. We also act a lot, sometimes knowingly so, but sometimes without us knowing. Life is bizarre, and my films are an attempt to capture and reflect on the bizarre.

PM: In Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, the Ed Norton character does this amazing hate-filled speech that attacks every possible minority group in New York – and it ends up seeming like this weird twisted love poem to New York. Your film feels for me like an inversion of that speech, South Africa being the America of Africa and Jo’burg being its New York, and every racial epithet being unfurled from a few blunt words into these human beings who are so completely vulnerable. When you set out to make the film, did you have specific intentions as to how things would work out, or did you approach the film more intuitively?

KM: The film was made without prior knowledge of a lot of things. There were no rehearsals. People say that I’m brave and maybe I am. But we live our lives without rehearsals and one cannot predict where one’s life will turn the next second or minute. I wanted to make a film that was like life itself, to go into the unknown. I wanted to be open to life and to an unknown cinematic journey. I also chose Tony Kgoroge because he is a curious actor. Not once does he dismiss or belittle the people he meets. He is open. The crew was also open to life’s possibilities and impossibilities.

PM: Another American habit that South Africans are in danger of imitating is getting so involved in our own national narrative that we forget about the rest of the world and the rest of the continent. The words “interrupts the national conversation” from the DIFF catalogue remains a resonant phrase for me. Do you think that South Africans are capable right now of opening themselves up to a broader narrative?

KM: I don’t know. We live in a globalised world. For me, I am surprised by how we are so similar in most ways. In terms of head-space, what is the difference between a 30-year-old in New York or Jo’burg or Maputo or Kampala? Denys Arcand, the Canadian filmmaker who made The Barbarian Invasions, says that the notion of borders is disappearing. In the future there will be those with the USA or those who are against it. I like that.

PM: To what extent do you think that xenophobia is actively encouraged by our media and government as a means of constructing scapegoats for economic failure and unemployment?

KM: It is bizarre that around the world immigrants and refugees are blamed for the economic woes of a country. But America was built on immigrants. We know in South Africa that the questions of economic failure and unemployment have to do mainly with apartheid and failure of certain current economic systems to deliver for the poor. We need to tax luxury goods to pay for the education of the poor.

PM: Regardless of any notions of truth/reality/documentary integrity, your film achieves a remarkable honesty. Do you think that by constructing multiple subjective realities (i.e. “fictionalised” accounts of reality), it is possible to perversely provide a much greater sense of that thing called objective reality?

KM: I don’t know what that phrase means. I prefer the word ‘honesty’. I try to be honest in my films. My friend Lesego Rampolokeng, the poet says, “Truth is treason and now liars rule the world”.

PM: Do you think that we will ever reach a situation where cinema is accessible to the majority of South Africans?

KM: Maybe yes, maybe no. But the masses continue to betray great artists and ideas. At the same time I don’t believe in the simple theory of the masses being good and the elite being evil. It’s far more complex.

PM: When you were in Durban for the film festival you spoke of other possible future projects. I know that you are currently shooting a television show. Can you tell me a little about this and other projects you are involved in?

KM: I’ve just finished shooting a TV series, When We Were Black, a four-part one hour drama series for the SABC, about a teenage boy who wants to fall in love set against the backdrop of the student uprisings of ‘76. Also there is a film called Violence about cycle of violence made with DV8 productions.

PM: The ’90s saw the emergence of many great independent voices in world cinema, many of which were subsequently absorbed into Hollywood. Would you ever be tempted to direct a mainstream blockbuster?

KM: Yes! I want to do a chick flick with three beautiful women kickin’ ass and flying on saucers as witches – mythology that I grew up with in my village. Subvert George Lucas. Yes, I want to do films with beautiful women that will gross 100 million US and I would be on the cover of the most shallow magazines in the world. Is this fiction or real, do you think? I mean my answer…I can’t tell.