Getting a full picture of South Africa

The Oscar-winning Tsotsi seems to be going down well with all South Africans. But more film-makers must emerge if the country's whole story is to be told, writes Emma Brockes.

There are certain headaches you get from making a film in South Africa that you just don't get in other parts of the world. When Gavin Hood sat down to write Tsotsi, the much-lauded story of a Johannesburg hoodlum, he faced, as well as the usual problems of pacing and narrative, the following issues: white people in the movie, yes or no? If yes, should they be old white people (ie apartheid-era) or young white people (post-apartheid)? Could he cast a Zulu as the bad guy, when the good guy was Tswana? What about Sothos in the audience - would they feel left out? Hood speaks Afrikaans, English and bad Zulu. His lead actors speak Sotho, Tswana and Zulu. The film was made in "tsotsi-taal", a street language amalgam of all five. It was not an easy shoot.

Tsotsi won best foreign film at this year's Oscars, the international acclaim it has won marking the crest of a wave that South African cinema has been riding since Darrell Roodt's Yesterday, an Aids weepie, won an award at Venice two years ago. Tsotsi is shortly to be followed by U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (winner of the Golden Bear last year in Berlin) a brilliant, Xhosa-language adaptation of Bizet's opera. A slew of other African-language films are in production. An industry that in 1995 generated 4,000 jobs now employs an estimated 20,000.

There is a sense that a new generation of South African directors is emerging who want to tell their own stories. The question is, does anyone else want to see them? Despite South Africa's wealth, its film industry is relatively undeveloped. Until recently it was 40 per cent cheaper to film in Cape Town than in the US, and 20 per cent cheaper than filming in Australia; the South African industry consequently bent itself around servicing foreign films and commercials.

Nicholas Cage's Lord of War was filmed there, as was Colin Farrell's new blockbuster, Ask the Dust. "It made sense for foreign productions to come to South Africa and shoot for peanuts," says Mark Dornford-May, director of U-Carmen. "You could add a nought to the cost and it would still be peanuts. But as the economy grew stronger, that started drying up, and it forced the industry to think long term."

The issue of whose film industry it is remains complicated. As with the vast majority of films made in South Africa, both Tsotsi and U-Carmen were directed by white men. The most prominent recent work by a black film-maker was Drum, a history of the famous campaigning magazine from the 1950s, but it was made with American backing and actors; director Zola Maseko faced a backlash at home for "selling out".

All local film industries outside the US face this problem. But South Africa's is particularly acute since its identity as a nation is still forming. "The big question", says Joel Phiri, who through his production company DV8 is championing black film-making, "is, who are the voices of South African cinema?"

THE HISTORY OF South African film is woeful. During the apartheid years the state funded almost exclusively Afrikaans-language films. The only "black" films were what South African film critic Matthew Krouse calls "blaxploitation at its worst and dirtiest" - Zulu-language films subsidised by the government that showed South Africa's black population endorsing apartheid.

When Hollywood moved in, it was to make "bleeding heart" films: Barbara Hershey as anti-apartheid activist Ruth First, Whoopi Goldberg in Sarafina!, the miscast James Earl Jones in Cry, the Beloved Country, and, most famously, Denzel Washington as Steve Biko in Cry Freedom. Most were naive about the interplay between the 11 different language groups in the country; they were, says Dornford-May, "based on laziness; the assumption that all black people are a bit the same".

Now, on TV at least, there is a healthy representation of black South Africans, and soap operas in particular have a large, growing audience that it is hoped will create a new market for locally produced feature films.

The problem continues to be one of economics: most cinemas are in white shopping malls and have prohibitively high ticket prices. State funding through the National Film & Video Foundation is helping, but it is sketchy. Only when there is healthier financing and distribution infrastructure "will real authentic black voices emerge", says Phiri. "Otherwise South African cinema will be susceptible to the whims of the global business; and the losers will be the South African people."

As long as most audiences are white and middle class, only certain types of films will be successful in South Africa. Tsotsi is a rare example of a film that seems to be playing well with all South Africans. According to Hood, it has had good returns in black and white areas of Johannesburg. Nationally, it took 40 per cent more in its opening weekend than the Africa-set The Constant Gardener.

Still, to the mortification of upmarket film-makers in the country, the highest grossing domestic films are not sensitive portraits of gangland Johannesburg, or arty reworkings of opera. Most South Africans who go to the cinema are only interested in local films if they're made by one man - Leon Schuster, an Afrikaans comedian specialising in the sort of slapstick humour that comes with titles such as You Must Be Joking!, You Must Be Joking Too! and There's a Zulu on My Stoep (terrace).

"It's either slapstick or pathology," says Maganthrie Pillay, one of South Africa's few black woman directors. By "pathology" she means South Africa's fixation with its violent past. "And that's why we need to tell more stories - to dig out a bagful of characters who colour our lives. It's this whole notion of what 'universal' might be. Whose 'universal'? If we are in a truly free South Africa, there needs to be a lot more women making films, and a lot more black people in general. Or we'll never get the whole story."

Nobody in South African film seems to believe white people shouldn't make films about black people, or vice versa. But there have been small rumblings about Tsotsi's authenticity. "Tsotsi is a very interesting black story, told for a white audience," says Patience Bambalele, a writer for the Sowetan newspaper. She says black South Africans watching the film have scoffed at Hood's sympathetic portrait of the street ruffian. "The reality is," she says, "that the thug never cries."

THIS IS JUST nit-picking, says Hood. When a local paper took some real tsotsis (the word actually means "thug") to see the film, they put on a show of bravado that Hood thinks was just defensiveness. "We don't see ourselves on screen in South Africa a lot. We're used to watching people from overseas in movies. And it's quite a shock when you first see yourself in a film."

U-Carmen, however, is a real home-grown success story. It started out as a stage show produced by Dimpho Di Kopane, the theatre company set up by Dornford-May and Charles Hazlewood in Cape Town in 2000. The play had sell-out runs in London and New York. Carmen is played by Pauline Malefane; she also co-wrote and translated the screenplay. Some 85 per cent of the crew were non-white. But it is in roles that require experience as well as talent that the skills gap is most glaring - it'll take time for black cinematographers to rise through the ranks, and, says Krouse, "script-writing is an enormous problem in a country that's been basically illiterate for a long time".

And directing, too. Thabang Moleya, 23, likens the kind of film he wants to make to City of God, the Brazilian feature that was internationally successful and true to its origins. Moleya liked Tsotsi. "I thought it was really well done. You could feel the guy's pain. Everything used to concentrate on apartheid. When people go to the cinema for a night out, they don't want a finger pointed at them saying - 'You! My life is all your fault.' We need to do genre films - horror, comedies. Less drama that reminds us of the pain we went through."

Predictably, the most marginalised voice in South Africa is that of black women. Despite forward-thinking anti-discrimination laws, South Africa remains a sexist country. "They still look at a woman and think, 'failure'," says Bambalele. When Pillay's debut film, 34 South, was released last year, she was hailed as the country's first black female director. "There are very few of us around," she says. "There are a gazillion women running around on film sets, but they're in the wardrobe and art departments, not in the director's spot." She hopes digital film-making will bring down the cost sufficiently to let in more voices.

Apart from that, she says, the priority for South African film-makers is to lighten up a bit. "We need to learn to laugh at ourselves more." And she bursts out laughing.