Wonderboy for President, the mockumentary film that imitates life

Director John Barker and actor Kagiso Lediga tell Tymon Smith why their movie is more real than reality

When Kagiso Lediga rocked up at the ANC's 2012 National Elective Conference, the biggest thing to hit Mangaung in a hundred years, he was greeted as just another celebrity there to endorse a second term for the leadership of Jacob Zuma.

Decked out in his yellow, green and black shirt with a lanyard bearing the smiling visage of No1, Lediga was backslapped by party officials and the supporters in the stands who took his three-fingered salutation as a sign of commitment that took their two-fingered, two-term endorsement to the next level.

The thing is, Lediga was there in character for a political mockumentary in which he plays a character called Wonderboy, an Eastern Cape naïf plucked from his village by two (fictitious) corrupt ANC Youth League branch members, Brutus (Tony B Miyambo) and Shakes (Ntobeko "Ntosh" Madlingozi), looking to save their political careers.

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Lediga's real-life recognition played right into the satirical setup and the Mangaung scenes became the backbone for the film developed by Lediga and longtime friend and collaborator director John Barker.

British prime minister Harold Wilson once famously said that "a week is a long time in politics", and that applies exponentially to the film, which has taken four years to complete. Made through deferring fees and raising money from friends, it cost a modest R200,000 to make - but, as Lediga quips ahead of its release this week, "it proves the concept of time and money because instead of R2-million to make the film, it took us four years".

While he and Barker had first started speaking about making a political mockumentary in 2011, it was Mangaung that proved the now-or-never moment and so they took their skeleton crew, all of whom slept in one room on a floor in a township for the weekend, and ventured into the madness and absurdity of that fateful weekend.

Barker recalls that "we always wanted to make something between Hal Ashby's Being There [the brilliant 1979 satire in which Peter Sellers plays a simple gardener who becomes a Washington insider] and Borat... We had a meeting just before Mangaung and we said we either do this film now but if we don't get to Mangaung, we're fucked. We thought Zuma was going to get kicked so we had to catch him."

Having already worked together on 2005's critically appreciated but hardly box office breaking improvisational comedy Bunny Chow, Lediga and Barker have experience of putting themselves into real situations where the outcomes of their interventions may be uncertain, but that's all part of the fun.

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"I think that's the great thing about improv stuff. It's living on the edge and you feel so alive," says Barker.

Lediga agrees, adding that "you're always sort of exposed. You're out there in the elements and it's exhilarating. So with the scene where Jacob Zuma rocks up in the stadium, I have to trust John, he has to trust me, everybody has to get everything and you just go, there's no second take.

"It's also always there at the edge of your mind that they're going to kick you out so as you're busy doing all of this you're also negotiating in your head how you're at least going to get away with the footage."

Luckily the footage, like Zuma, survived the conference.

After 20 days of shooting over four years there was a point at which, Barker admits, "we had to shake hands - because we kept going back and shooting different pieces - and say regardless, we're not going to shoot any more".

So while there are elements of the story of Julius Malema and the cadences of Gwede Mantashe in the Wonderboy character, there are aspects of more recent political developments that aren't in the film.

Everything, from a satirical film to the ruling party, has to end some time and fortuitously the film arrives just ahead of the municipal elections, which feeds nicely into its political-campaign-themed marketing campaign.

We South Africans like to pride ourselves on being politically savvy and able to laugh at ourselves and there's plenty of evidence of our ability to do this, from comedy clubs to theatres to arts festivals and TV shows, but there's a lacuna in the obvious absence of political satire in post-apartheid cinema.

It's not certain whether this is indicative of an unwillingness by state funding institutions to bite the hand that feeds them or nervousness on the part of filmmakers about the potential blowback.

While Wonderboy for President certainly takes a significant step in highlighting the absurdities of our politics to big-screen audiences, its creators are also cognisant of not "being too scathing. We didn't want to get personal," says Barker.

"Even to Jacob Zuma. We call him the one-man wrecking ball in the film, but that's about as harsh as we got. We wanted people to see it and be able to relate to it."

It's also a challenge to satirise a political climate so devoid of irony on the part of its participants that it has almost become its own unique brand of comic entertainment, producing daily face-palming reactions of dismay.

Lediga reflects that "what we take as normal in South African politics is pretty hilarious standup-comedy-level shit. We go watch Hlaudi and Julius because it's like a comedy set. As a challenge I'd like to see on the same night if you said Trevor Noah is in one room and Julius is in the other, how many people would go to which room?"

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Of course this means that many people believe comedians must be revelling in the daily dose of material provided by politicians and parliament. But Lediga says that while people who see him on the streets may say, "Wow. You guys must be loving it hey?" his reaction is, "Not a fuck are we loving it! These guys are so funny on their own, how do we send them up when they're already sending themselves up?"

The answer, at least for Barker and Lediga, was to combine the situational gags from Mangaung with set-up interviews with real-life politicians such as Malema, Zwelinzima Vavi and Mmusi Maimane, cameos from their friends in the comedy world and a plot in which Wonderboy proves more popular and less easy to control than his puppet masters would like, creating a wonderfully hilarious cautionary tale about the follies of power.

It was created in response to desperate times. For Barker, "that's why we did it. As filmmakers you have to talk about your society and your surrounds. It's our responsibility. You can't keep talking about it and do nothing about it."

Whether or not you agree with the filmmakers' perspective on the ANC will depend on you, but Barker hopes the film will at the very least "spark some sort of discussion and people will get a sense that there are people who are doing satire and who are taking on the government and that there's still freedom of speech and you don't have to fear for your life. People need to take up the mantle and keep asking questions."

'Wonderboy for President' opens in cinemas on Friday.