IFFR 2010 Forget Africa

Memories of Malawi

 (Deborah 2)

Sorry for the delay in giving you the promised second chapter on my visit to Malawi with Deborah Stratman. In the future I will think twice before I announce a sequel. I moved on to Tanzania where I met one of oldest friends, the German filmmaker Uli Schueppel and had quite something to do right away. To control our budget we moved into a modest hotel with the slowest internet connection thinkable. It looked like nice idea to make a blog mainly based on pictures, but the uploading of them requires more speed than the net most of the time can offer here. Anyway. Back to Malawi. Back to Deborah and all the nice music people she found.

Filming is small township recoring studio in Blantyre, Malawi.

We visited the sound studio of the energetic Lionel. A singer and show man himself. And a real entrepreneur. He operates from a small building in the middle of a township. Guarded like a fortress. In the same place he has a sewing shop. The tailor and music producer clearly has a flourishing business. At the day of our visit he was making a cd for a local church choir. The studio has the size of a living room so not all the member could fit in, but also with just half the choir is was a steaming place. Every now and then Lionel threw half the choir out to have some air in the room. Electricity and streaming water is very rare in townships so it was not just body heat in the air.The mostly young choir members were singing their lungs out. It was a real touching situation. When Deborah (in a way that is typical for her) asked the choir during a break to sing outside whe could hear the real dedication and the real gospel. Hallelujah.

Deborah’s interest in recording and sound does not limit itself to music. She is also interested in radio as a social instrument. In a country like Malawi a radio on batteries is often the only contact with the outside world and radio making has still another meaning and relevance than in societies where everybody has electricity (in Malawi only 4% of the population has electricity) and even internet. We met Rafiq Hajat. Rafiq is of Indian decent, but his family is living in Malawi for many generation. Rafiq is a colorful character. He enjoys life and his Jack Daniels. He is a political activist without a party and a radio maker without a program (since his Lazy H political music show was banned). Rafiq knows everything there is to know about and Deborah sent him out in a mission. To find the Blantyre Zoo (those who know me better will know the mission was in fact mine).

Malawian political activist Rafiq Hajat while being interviewt by Deborah Stratman.

Deborah Stratman interview activist dj Rafiq Hajat in his car.

It looked like the Zoo finding mission would fail. Few people had heard of the Zoo and those who remembered said the Zoo was no longer there. But people like Rafiq are not easy to stop. So he found the Zoo. When we entered it was not immediately clear that the Zoo indeed was no more. The whole terrain and the animal cages were well maintained, Only no sign of animals. Somebody looked over a board on a cage and smiled. Have a look. The Zoo was converted in a school and the cages were changed into classrooms. The son of the headmaster gave us a guided tour.

Deborah Stratman and son of headmaster in former animal cage.

The metaphorical quality of the place was overwhelming. Old fashion school furniture in Python cages. The heavy door to the lions cage in the math room. The whole colonial set up - the Zoo clearly a heritage from the British time, for most Africans wild animals are walking meat - and the conversion into a kind of private school for parents who wants their children to learn English, but who's mean are limited. I have seen my share of Zoo's but the Blantyre Zoo is something special.

There are not that many filmmakers active in Malawi, but the ones that are there we met. We had a really nice dinner in Chez Maky, in my nice hotel restaurant driven by a music lover from Cameroon. But they did not have a lot to show. Filmmaking in one of the least developed countries in the world is obviously not that easy.

Eldson Chagara is running a small company making corporate video’s and commercials, but together with his editor-cinematographer he Wyson Black he was busy to make a personal feature film project on the side. He invited us to have a look at the rushes in his studio.

Blantyre filmmaker Eldson Chagara (right)and his cinematographer-editor Wyson Black.

Consciously or not Eldson and Wyson appeared to be on their way in inventing a Malawian version of neo-realism. Without any irony they tried to show Malawian life in a true to life story. The attempt is for sure to be appreciated.

Unfortunately my stay with Deborah in Malawi was a bit short, but she was an inspiring guide and her little sketch book was full of useful notes and nice observations. As a goodbye I give you a little peak in it.

Boabab Tree in notebook Deborah Stratman.

　

　

　

 

　

　

Deborah 1

 American film artist Deborah Stratman combed Malawi in a passioned search for dj's and musicians. Programmer Gertjan Zuilhof joined her for a week and had dinner with the local filmmakers.

 

Deborah Stratman is into sound. And music as well. So in Malawi (yes the Malawi of Madonna and yes, one of the poorest countries in the world) we not only visited filmmakers, but quite a number of musicians and radio people as well. And she likes to involve local people in her quest for songs and other sounds. Visiting the local video store of Blantyre (not the official capital city, but the more happening place where the media people work) she asked the workers in the store about their favorite genre and when this turned  out to be musical she asked them to write and performe a musical number for her movie. Even the doormen and the cleaning ladies of the headoffice of the internet provider Skyband (we camped often in the lobby of the buidling since it was the only place with a decent wifi reception)  she convinced to do a choir song together in the entrance hall of the buidling.

 

Spontaneous choir of doormen and cleaners in Blantyre, Malawi.

 

Deborah is the pale lady with the Rich Guy sign (she found it on the street and took is as a present for the poor guy who looks after her cats).

She also asked serious and professional musicians to do things for her and her movie. She asked the singer-songwriter Agorosso to go back to his home town in the N'sanje region (a four hour drive on a bumpy road) and perform his songs in his hometown. We went with a small company in a small car driven by the exentric Englishman (Englishmen in former colonies are mostly execentric I guess) Harrold Williams. Apart from the musician and ourselves also local filmmaker Michael Phoyu joined the outing.

 

 

Deborah Straman and musician Agorosso.

 

When arrived in Agorosso's village (just simple huts, sand, goats and a lot of dirty and dusty children) we quickly greeted his mother and right after that we had to pay our respect to the village chief.

 

 

Paying respect to the Village Chief. The chief in return gave his respect to the musician from the big city (right).

 

Moving around through the village (in fact just dry emptyness) we were permanently followed by the clichee image of African villages: a big group of running and shouting smelly children. But when Agorosso unpacked his guitar and started singing in front of his mother's house they sat themselves quietly down on the dirt for as long as the concert lasted.

Agorosso was clearly emotional about it all. Not that long ago he himself had been running around in this dirt.

 

 

Musician Agorosso performing in front of his mothers house.

 

Agorosso is still a young man, but as an even younger man he had been a boatman. With a boat made out of a hollow tree he would bring up to 20 people (or 10 people and 20 goats) to the other side of the river. To the border with Mozambique.

Ispired by the river Agorosso told us about the traditional hippo song. Children playing at the river would sing it when they saw hippo's. According to legend the hippo's like the song and dance on it under water. For Agorosso not a legend by the way. He had seen it himself. More than once even.

 

 

It was not so dry as it looks. Behind us is the wide river. Musician Agorosso in red, Michael Phoyu in yellow and Deborah Stratman in blue.

 

Our driver Harrold told us many stories and anecdotes along the way.

He had been living in Malawi for almost fifty years. Approaching seventy he had come as young officer in the repressive colonial police force (his words). He stayed after the independence and married a Malawian wife. Like other white people in Malawi he had devoted himself to preserving the nature of the country. Although he only lived a small part of his life in England he still wanted to be back in time to see Liverpool play on tv. The ride back was even more bumpy.

 

 

Far right Harrold Wiliams and far left the Wife of the Village Chief.

 

 

(to be continued in Deborah 2)

Control Room

In which filmmaker Kimi Takesue travels North and programmer Gertjan Zuilhof finds the most talented guy in town.

 

Most of the time things went smooth in Kampala en we had

a good time. We met a lot of kind persons. We visited places that you can hardly describe as lively. They were volcanic. Bursting with energy and packed with people. Quite often our new friends and also strangers warned us for possible dangers. They for example asked Kimi: did you go to the Owino market with that necklace?

 

 

Just off the Owino Market in Kampala.

 

The morning after the warning a snatch thief took the necklace by ripping it off. In broad daylight. On a busy street. Just a minute walk from the heavily guarded hotel.  Only later we heard that the women working in the hotel always took all jewelry off when they leave the building.

For Kimi the little chain had mostly sentimental value and it did not stop her from her plan to go up north with friend and actor Okello to visit a sanctuary for children who were orphanaged by the civil war. I quoted to Okello a passage from the latest edition of The Lonely Planet on the region (dangerous they write), but he assured me that it was safe and promised to take good care of my filmmaker.

 

 

Kimi Taksue repacking to go up North Uganda.

 

Now that I did not have to carry tripods around anymore I could use the rest of my time in Uganda to do what a programmer should do: hanging out with filmmakers. The National Theatre sounds like an official place but it is not. It is a very lively place that has something to offer every night and every room, corner, field, roof in and around it is used for jam sessions, work shops, meetings and plays. At a comedy night easily a thousand people turn up to watch an entertaining show with local stand up comedians, everybody seated outside on the grass on self carried plastic chairs. Also filmmakers use the building to rehearse with actors or just to meet each other.

The local Film Club meets in the building to have work shops with aspiring actors and directors. Everybody is eager and nobody talks money (I guess because nobody has any).

 

 

Work Shop with Young Actors in the Kampala Film Club.

 

Also in the National Theatre I had a meeting with scriptwriter and director Irene Kulabako. In fact we met in the so called control room of the theatre, the cabin at the back of the big theatre hall. It is the kingdom of technician Leonard and only later I realized I could have saved me a lot of time by going to him in his control room first. Everybody passes through his room and he knows everybody. I took the liberty of setting up all my meetings in his control room on my last day in town and indeed everybody could find it blindfolded.

Back to Irene. She told me how they set up a group with some collegue professionals with the idea to make a movie a year without funding. All members bring in themselves, their equipment and their skills for free. And every year they set themselves a technical challenge on top of that. This year it is special effects with rain and fog. I think it is a wonderful idea. She gave me dvd's, so later I will write about the result.

 

 

Filmmaker Irene Kulabako in National Theatre control room.

 

In Uganda I had some good advisors in Alice Smits and Lee Ellickson who run the Amakula Film Festival in the country. They are not locals (she is from Holland and he from the US), but they are as close to locals as muzungus (whites) can come. During my stay in Kampala they were out of the country, but they gave me an impressive shopping list and borrowed me their assistant Sarah who drove me around and who by the way showed me how to keep too persistent hustlers on a distance. One of the many names on the list was a Samson. He was highly recommended, but not easy to track down. At the end of my stay I finally met him and I realized soon that it was worth the effort. He goes by the artist/graffiti name Xenson (full name Ssenkaaba Samson) and is a trained painter, video artist and fashion designer. Yes, fashion designer. In October he will have a show in Paris. I saw some of his shorts and music video's (he is coming out of the hip hop scene, where he also started to make urban cloths) and I was very impressed. They belong to the best in the genre. He also told me about his installations (in which he can combine his many talents) and I guess it would be

nice to have him make one in Rotterdam. I will check it out.

 

 

Fashion designer and video artist Xenson, Kampala, Uganda.

 

 

In and around Kampala

New York filmmaker Kimi Takesue and Rotterdam programmer Gertjan Zuilhof are going places in and around Kampala, Uganda. Like the Entebbe Zoo. 

All filmmakers work differently. This is how Kimi Takesue works. She inquirers where to go and who or what to see there. When arrived at a market, a club, a church or the zoo, she starts by unfolding her tripod and mounting her quite big camera. She has a small one but does not use it much. She puts it up - very often quite low to the ground - in front of her object and just starts filming.

 

A school class in the Entebbe Zoo.

 

 

At first people are just wondering, but quite soon they get curious. What is there to see in the view finder? Especially children wonder

why they are being filmed and what happens to their image in

the camera.

 

 

Children, small and big, on an outing to the Entebbe Zoo.

 Quite soon they are no longer shy and come over and watch.

 

The view finder they all wanted to see.

I have quite a few pictures of a mountain of children and an invisible filmmaker inside. Kimi always comes out of it. She keeps on smiling and talking and after a while the children have seen enough or they start answering Kimi's questions. Questions like: do you know who Obama is?

 

She came out again.

With adults it can be a different thing. Markets are wild places here and reactions are sometimes aggressive. But Kimi just keeps on smiling and talking and most people give in and if not she just moves her tripod a little bit further and starts talking to somebody else. Like to the shoe shiners on top of a roof near the old taxi station, the wildest place in town. A deluge of second hand shoes given by Western charity organization ruined the local profession of shoe making. Nothing can compete with free shoes. Charity is bad for the economy you have to conclude. Now the former shoe makers shine the second hand shoes to make them look like new. They buy the shoes in front of the building out of piles of charity shoes. They shine them like new on the roof and sell them to stalls at the back of the building. So a bit of economy after all.

 

Kimi and the shoe shining men on a roof at the old taxi market in Kampala.

Apart from children and shoe shiners we also meet filmmakers. Filmmakers of all kinds. Quite special was the meeting with VJ Ivan who runs a boxing school and a video hall. In the hall (made out of old wood and cardboard and set up in the middle of a slum) he presents Nigerian melodrama's and old Hong Kong action movies with something that is more than a translation. He makes an extra elaborate soundtrack on top of the original soundtrack (that is more or less erased) and tells all kinds of extra's to entertain his audience. He is also making films with the kids from his boxing school and while we were filming him he let his camera man film us.

 

Kimi Takesue interviews VJ Ivan in front of his Video Hal in Kampala slum.

There are not that many young filmmakers here in Uganda that have the ambition to make work that can be shown in international film festivals. All our contacts mentioned all the time just two. Donald Mugisha who teached himself  filmmaking by making music video's with friends and Caroline Kamya who studied in England and runs a professional production office called iVad.

 

Filmmaker Donald Mugisha in front of Pap Cafe in Kampala.

 

Kimi Takesue and filmmaker and producer  Caroline Kamya on the roof of her Kampala office.

 

Kampala shore of Lake Victoria.

We see places. In the picture you see the shore of Lake Victoria. A lake as big as a sea. The man is dusty from carrying bags in boats. That's why his trousers are wet. In the hut a group of men play board games. African game on a colorful board. We saw it in markets all the time. The bird is a Maribou Stork. A scavenger bird. Here he looks for dead fish. You see them also in the city. A filmmaker told us they came into the city during the war to eat all the dead bodies and after the war they stayed.

Weightlifting

 

Tan Chui Mui left South Africa as an African woman. Two or sometimes three women worked on her hair for almost four hours to give her a real Afro look.

 

 

Tan Chui Mui at the gate in Johannesburg on her way home.

 

After saying goodbye to Edwin who would fly home to Jakarta to prepare his wedding (congratulations my friend to you and your wife to be) I took the plane to Kampala, Uganda, to meet Kimi Takesue. Kimi is an American, New York based, filmmaker who thanks her name to a Japanese father. Her short films have been shown all over the place and she was this close to getting her first feature financed. You could call her a credit crunch victim in a sense.

Kimi arrived a day earlier in Kampala and on her first day she was invited to a massive wedding with lots of local celebrities. She shot seven hours of tape and got many offers to do wedding video's in Uganda.

No less spectacular was the visit to the African Weightlifting Championship in the impressive Imperial Royale Hotel here. We were so lucky to stumble in the session of the female lifters. Amazing young women who quite often lifted the double of their own weight. Kimi just walked into the dressing room and looked very happy about her footage.

The whole setting of this megalomaniac hotel, the audience of retired weightlifters officials from all over Africa and those young women screaming under too much weight had an overwhelming metaphorical feel, but I did not really figure out yet what the metaphor stands for.

 

 

Kimi Takesue filming at African Weightlifting Competition with two camera's.

 

Yes Kimi brought two camera's. One her old and trusted Panasonic and the other a small smart HD Canon. She had not decide yet which one to use, so for the moment she uses both.

 

Female African Weightlifting Championship, Kampala 2009.

 

The woman in the picture is candidate Clementina Agricole (53kg) of the Seychelles. She had the most striking performance with loud screams and an eye for the camera. She lifted more than a 100 kg , but she did not win. The silent woman from Cameroon was clearly more experienced and mentally stronger.

Kimi will stay longer in Uganda than I will. She will also travel North to the places that were most hit by the civil war. The Lonely Planet advises you not to go there, but she will go in the trusted company of actor and activist Okello Kelo Sam.

 

 

Okello Kelo Sam and Kimi Takesue in front of Steke Hotel, Kampala.

 

Okello is the director and founder of the Ndere Troupe, that is famous for its topic plays and music performances. He is also the man behind Hope North, that set up a home for former child soldiers in Northern Uganda. He got some international fame after playing a role in The Last King of Scotland (on dictator Idi Amin) by Kevin Macdonald.

Our hotel by the way is heavily guarded. The whole city is full of armed security guards and the hotel has at least ten of them. In total there must be an army of thousands of them in the city, since they not only are seen around big hotels but also around normal shopping streets and markets.

 

 

Steke Hotel Kampala armed security guard.

The Future is Man

Sarah Dawson is a nice, young and smart Durban filmmaker. Or maybe still a film student. She is as white as they come. Our first impression was that is was nice and special that the group of young Durban filmmakers had different racial backgrounds. After two weeks we still think that is nice - and it inspired Tan Chui Mui to shoot a short documentary on it - but by now we also start to see other things in the city. A city that still is very much divided in places where certain people come and certain other people don't come. Since we are more or less tourists we quite often walk in the wrong places, where non black people mostly don't come.

Mui interviewed Sarah close to the art centre where she likes to come, which is a very white place in a very white neighborhood.

 

Sarah Dawson in Park near her favorite Gallery in Durban.

Tan Chui Mui did the final shootings for her short science fiction film. We went back to the blue smoking room of our favorite bar (58 on Albany, a kind of all black place), this time with two actors dressed up as construction workers.

 

Monitor screen with rushes of the shoot in the 58 on Albany bar.

The shooting went fine. We went to the bar almost every night and the local boys started to forget that we were out of place in their bar.

The actors we found through our improvised audition session after a festival work shop. One of them developed himself quite naturally into the main character. His name is Muzi Mhlanga and during the audition he said he could also sing. So during an outdoor shoot Mui asked him to sing something. And yes the guy could sing. Through the earphones 

connected to the wireless microphone it sounded as if you just had walked into a Motown studio. And Muzi had also a real Zulu dance as a gift to the production.

 

Tan Chui Mui adjusting Muzi Mhlanga's wireless microphone.

The Taiwanese actor Chen Wien-Pin, who plays the main role in the Tiger competition film No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti by Leon Dai is in fact a documentary filmmaker. He was in town since the film plays also

in competition in Durban. He liked to follow us on the shoot and like Edwin he immediately gave a helping hand. So the little film grew into a Taiwanese, Dutch, Indonesian, Malaysian, South African co-production:-).

Taiwanese actor Chen Wien-Pin of No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti joins as a still photographer on the set.

Tan Chui Mui came without a preconceived plan to Durban, which proved to be the right idea. So Muzi could grow into the role of man of the future. A future without a woman or a girl.