The new Joburg Film Festival is bringing thoughtful and controversial movies to a range of venues across the city, writes Tymon Smith If you're one of those cinephiles who wistfully remembers the days when you could spend hours at your local Cinema Nouveau watching the Cannes Palme D'Or winner and a selection of other actual art films from around the world, you'll have noticed that these days screens are more likely to be devoted to the latest Ladies in Lavender derivative or some mainstream French schlocky heartstring-tugging tale of redemption.If you want to see films that offer an alternative to the increasingly straight fare, your best bet is to wait for a festival and cram as much as you can into a few days in the hope your binge will sustain you until next year.The main festival in South Africa, the Durban International Film Festival , is a few hundred kilometres from where I live - but the inaugural Joburg Film Festival has thankfully arrived just in time to provide a selection of 60 films to satisfy the hunger pangs of film lovers of all tastes a little closer to my home.story_article_left1Programme director Pedro Pimenta, who was in charge of last year's Durban festival, has made the most of the tabula rasa that a new festival offers.Born in Mozambique, Pimenta began his film career in production. When he "started losing interest because around me there was nothing of real surprise but the repetition of the same kind of films being made", he moved into festival curation.It's a sphere in which he enjoys "the great pleasure in making audiences discover new films".While the festival will showcase films from around the world, its focus is on work from South Africa and the continent. Pimenta says he believes that "there is something of a moral duty for a programmer in Africa to provide African content of excellence a platform of prestige whereby African film content is treated like any other relevant film. We have to do it because nobody else is and that's a pity."Festivalgoers can thus see films from Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Mozambique alongside content such as Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (winner of this year's Palme D'Or) and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin as well as local films including Zola Maseko's long-awaited Zakes Mda adaptation The Whale Caller, Akin Omotoso's Vaya and Rehad Desai's The Giant is Falling.Pimenta is particularly proud of the fact that the festival "is showing very good films from different places where people have made a conscious choice to show them here first because it's new and they can play something to their advantage instead of going somewhere else. The idea of stepping into new territory is exciting for filmmakers."There's an additional incentive to premier at the Joburg festival: the R350,000 in prize money up for grabs in the competition section for the winners in the best overall, South African and African film categories.full_story_image_hright1The festival's opening-night choice is the much-anticipated Mandela's Gun. The festival will close with this year's controversial Sundance winner Birth of a Nation.Pimenta hopes that audiences will see the connection between the two films, which show "that throughout history - during slavery and more recently during apartheid - you always had one man somewhere who decided to try and change something. So there is obviously a strong political link between the opening and closing films."While making use of established cinema venues such as Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank and The Bioscope in Maboneng, the festival - in partnership with the City of Johannesburg - is also adopting a more inclusive approach to attracting audiences by setting up various screenings in non-regular cinemas across the city.These include The Majestic in Fordsburg, King's Theatre in Alexandra and the Alexander Theatre in Braamfontein.As Pimenta says, Johannesburg is a "city with its own contradictions and challenges and we believe that our role is to facilitate access to new orders and take cinema closer to where new audiences are. I don't think we can realistically expect people to face the costs of public transport, parking and whatever to come to a regular cinema."story_article_right2As a programmer Pimenta follows the cardinal rule of festival programming, which is that "you are not programming for yourself. You're programming for an audience." With this in mind, the festival won't just be a cinephiles-only, high art-house affair."There are certain titles that we will be showing that are obviously of huge appeal and while they will never win an Oscar, they build audiences. You have to look at building audiences in the long term. We have to start somewhere and I believe we can start in a place where we provide different audiences with different content so that we try and map geographically and demographically different potential audiences."The industry part of the programme is provided through a partnership with Discop, Africa's premier television market, which will be held in Johannesburg during the festival.Pimenta says he believes that in the age of the digital revolution, the worlds of film and television "are more and more in a place of convergence. Television is a fantastic medium and the two need to get closer so this conversation is of huge relevance to what we are trying to achieve."Pimenta says he hopes that the first edition of the festival will "prove that it can work. [The Durban festival] has been there for many years and does a great job but I do think that a country like South Africa deserves more than one international film festival with different approaches and visions."If nothing else, his greatest wish is that the films on offer will help "audiences understand that cinema is as diverse as humanity - everybody around the world has been driven by the love of storytelling and many of the stories we share as humanity are universal.Understanding that diversity contributes to one humanity in terms of understanding this world better and understanding other people and cultures and understanding that stories are valid when well told."• The Joburg Film Festival takes place from October 28 to November 5. For the schedule and venue information, visit joburgfilmfestival.co.za - and see discopafrica.com for industry events...