REVERENCE for heritage doesn’t come cheap, judging by the R24m budget for Kalushi, a powerful biopic depicting struggle icon Solomon Mahlangu, hanged in 1979.
Sharing the line-up at the 2016 Durban International Film Festival is Wonder Boy for President, a political mockumentary that shows irreverence can get by on a gadfly budget of R300,000.
Both films have been successes with festival audiences and will be screened again on Saturday, during the festival’s closing weekend.
They then head for general release: Wonder Boy for President on July 29, just before the elections; and Kalushi on September 16, in the middle of Heritage Month.
Despite taking years of gestation, Wonder Boy benefits from current narratives of state capture and electioneering, while Kalushi marks the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, and 60 years since Mahlangu’s birth in 1956.
Film-maker John Barker took five years to complete Wonder Boy, “because we had to make it hand to mouth”. He’d already worked on high-budget local films, such as Spud 3: Learning to Fly with comedy legend John Cleese, but knew a mockumentary would be a harder sell than an audience-friendly comedy or romcom.
WONDER Boy is a satire hinging on a covert ANC operation to plant an Eastern Cape unknown in the party’s higher echelons, where he can be used as a front by established interests.
Fundraising began informally when the team needed to shoot footage at the ANC’s 2012 Mangaung leadership conference.
“Several of us have worked together for about 15 years, going back at least to The Pure Monate Show, which was ahead of its time with the kind of humour that’s more popular now,” Barker says.
Their take on photobombing, for example, sees political leaders Jacob Zuma, Helen Zille, Zwelinzima Vavi, Julius Malema, and Mmusi Maimane playing themselves. Creating the illusion, needed major audacity.
“Improvisation is perfect for that,” says producer and lead Kagiso Lediga. “We needed a stage shot to establish Wonder Boy at a meeting in Wits Great Hall. So, we told the security guy we just needed to ‘speak to Steven’. We’re waved past, get up there and shake this guy’s hand. He looks at me like, ‘WTF?’ But we’ve got the shot!”
Source: Mail and Guardian
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