Pop-up cinema is having a moment in Durban

22 March 2017 - 14:07 By SIPHILISELWE MAKHANYA
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"Afri Cine", a monthly pop-up cinema event, focuses on films from the continent.
"Afri Cine", a monthly pop-up cinema event, focuses on films from the continent.
Image: SIPHILISELWE MAKHANYA

Durbanites are embracing the pop-up cinema trend.

Francophiles have the twice or sometimes three times monthly Cine Club series of French films spanning a miscellany of genres.

The Durban Botanic Gardens has taken to festive day outdoor screenings, such as on this past Valentine's Day.

In neighbouring Pietermaritzburg the residents picnic in the glow of a giant screen on a semi-regular basis at the Take1 Open Air cinema shows.

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And now there's "Afri Cine", a monthly pop-up cinema event with a focus on films from the continent.

Organised by inveterate doer Steve Jones, it launched last Thursday with a screening of the documentary Beats of the Antonov, directed by Hajooj Kuka.

We arrived at The Exchange, a shared retail space with a coffee and cake nook in Durban's Station Drive precinct, at 6.30pm to find a cluster of chairs circling a portable screen, a couch of cool types cheering while a pair of musicians strummed mellow renditions of popular tunes.

A few of the early attendees had already settled into their seats with plates of food to count down the minutes until the 7pm screening began. We ordered Mediterranean chicken wraps at the counter for the full experience - how often at a conventional cinema do you get to eat proper food off proper plates using silverware? Sure, the major commercial cinemas have introduced reclining couches and sushi selections in recent years but they come at a pretty price, not R40 entry and R60 for the food. Also, as Jones observed, "you're free to enjoy a beer".

The film began slightly after 7pm, by which point three-quarters of the seats were occupied.

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On the screen, a bomber plane circled overhead and what had appeared at first to be earth mounds in the ground popped open to reveal moving limbs - they were bomb shelters.

Set in the Sudanese Blue Nile and Nuba Mountain regions, the film became an immersive dip into the everyday lives carved out by people in the spaces between the violence of the conflict in Sudan. In those spaces there is music - the beats to which the title refers. There is the fight to protect what remains of the cultural identities of the more than 50 ethnicities of the region from subsummation into an Arabic-Islamic one. There are adolescent girls penning ditties to the beat of makeshift drums. A mother explains why she would forbid her daughter to use the same skin-lightening cream she does to bleach her own dark skin.

A stumbling discussion followed the showing. "It was a conscious decision" to choose films that would start conversations, Jones told us. "It's twisted, the system is how it is. We're all stuck in it." He was referring to the parallels of coerced assimilation between the Sudanese people in the film and that of black South Africans. The programme of films to come, he added, would feature "some that are nostalgic and happy, and others that are going to be challenging".

"Basically, we want to get films where we can get contact with the film-makers. We hope to honour them and pay to screen their work."

• Like the AFRI CINE Nights page on Facebook for updates on monthly screenings.

• This article was originally published in the Times.

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