Movies: A South African filmmaker abroad ...

Attending film festivals across the globe, Andrew Worsdale is both thrilled by the talent out there and disappointed in his own country's poor show

Last July, Durban Poison, a film I wrote and directed, won Best South African Feature at the Durban International Film Festival. As a result, I was invited to several film festivals across the globe. First was Busan, South Korea, in October, immediately followed by London, a week later Goa, a month later Dubai and, most recently, Egypt's Luxor African Film Festival.

It was exhausting. The film didn't sell to anybody, although some loved it, but above all I came back questioning our national cinema, and why we don't actually have one.

Doing the festival circuit requires stamina and networking skills, not to mention money. While you might get flown somewhere and put up in a larney spot, you need money and if, like me, you have very little, it deepens the challenge.

Not just money for lunch or a cup of coffee, you need money for marketing. In my case, I had none. The production company and the National Film and Video Foundation both said their budgets were exhausted. And so I had no posters, no postcards or flyers or buttons, key chains, trinkets or mittens. Just me and my Durban Poison cap. That was the extent of the marketing and PR support.

I have other advice: Don't think you can see all the movies and go to all the networking sessions or panels or parties. Most importantly, don't think everyone is going to get your movie the way you do.

Durban Poison is fairly unique as a South African film. It is, I believe, a break from Schuster and Karoo comedy and the Jozi gangster flicks that identify SA cinema at present. But to someone from Goa or Luxor or Dubai or Busan, it's just another Bonnie-and-Clyde-type road movie they've seen before, except this time with SA white trash.

Beyond my movie, however, these travels changed my perspective as a South African filmmaker. It reinforced my disdain for the gatekeepers local filmmakers have to deal with, whether they're broadcasters, distributors, state foundations or even so-called producers who seem addicted to the DTI incentive not to tell original stories, but to keep a roof over their production company.

Why do we always look at Hollywood or Europe for validation or as a guideline? There are way more interesting films being made in the rest of the world that we don't recognise or are prevented from seeing by the powers that be. In my travels, I saw amazing films from Korea, India, Mongolia, Bhutan, Morocco, Palestine, Rwanda, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Egypt and Brazil that tell stories which I reckon would be way better to follow in our attempts to define a national cinema.

Film festivals offer an intense week where you feel this real sense of community. Strangers can become best film friends forever, before the closing party. And always, without fail, you'll be shoulder to shoulder with a stranger who's super famous and you have no clue.

Like the night I went to the Asian Star Awards dinner at the Hyatt. I had no idea that the 20-something dude on my right during the meal was the reason throngs of young girls were screaming outside.

Turned out he was Choi Seung Hyun, better known as T.O.P, a rapper, model, lead singer of Korean boy band Big Bang and now a mega movie star. I thought he was rather snooty and precious, but then I didn't know who he was.

On the other hand, you may get too familiar with famous filmmakers. I mean, after all, they really should know you're their best friend. At the Irish party in Busan, I danced wildly with Angel O'Donoghue, the ambassador, before engaging in deep conversation with Jim (In the Name of the Father) Sheridan about politics in entertainment, only to turn round and see director Neil Jordan. I kissed him as if he was my long-lost brother. They're Irish, so by the time the sun was coming up, we were long-lost brothers in that film festival kind of way.

My movie went down well, that's what matters. The week before the festival, the cinema booked for my small movie had been showing Iron Man 3. The screen was gargantuan and I thought the film would look like a bad home movie, but the projection was exquisite. At the end, I had fans, a few, granted, but they wanted my autograph on their tickets. The review in the Festival Daily the next morning really got the movie: "When the actors' realistic acting meets the music, you will experience the film's distinct joy."

But it was lost among 299 films from around the world, no marketing trinkets to alert anybody.

The day before I was due to leave, I got a call from Pierre Rissient, who wished to see Durban Poison. A kingmaker in the film-festival world, Rissient is a cult figure among cinephiles, one of those legendary behind-the-scenes operatives whom people love to claim to know. I told him I'd bring a DVD to his hotel immediately. I had to meet him.

Rissient has a keen interest in South African cinema, which began when he got Mapantsula into the Cannes Film Festival in 1987. He asked me why there was no SA cinema, why we host the best parties at Cannes yet have no movies. I told him about Jahmil Qubeka's dazzling Of Good Report and Donovan Marsh's slickly kinetic iNumber Number.

He said: "But where are the films? You cannot make two or three films a year with international appeal and claim to have a national cinema or a cinematic identity." He shook his head in despair, because he'd love to see more from us. We just don't have it to show him.

The London Film festival is a feast with too many movies, all the major new Hollywood biggies, all the art-fest hits and then the rest. As a public festival, it has a huge profile but it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing really in festival connoisseur status. It's more like a massive public smorgasbord and they don't put you up in a hotel, or even fly you there. I just came out thinking there were too many films, and so many of them wouldn't be seen outside their home country, if that.

A week later, I was at the International Film Festival of India in Goa and once again was struck by how little I knew about other cinemas. I learnt there's beguiling stuff beyond Bollywood. With 28 states and 350 major languages, India has many film industries within its borders.

I was chatting to a producer from Kolkata when he was asked if he was going to see a film from Assam. He wasn't because there were no subtitles. I imagined we should have movie industries for all our official languages and the unofficial ones as well. Where is our Venda, Sotho, Xhosa, Pedi and Zulu film industry?

Dubai underscored this even more. Of the 174 movies shown, 100 were from the Arab world, with 40% of the filmmakers being women. Cinema from the region is enjoying unparalleled growth and filmmakers are excelling at making entertainment that's political.

I was wondering how these get financed and was astounded to find that one (They Are The Dogs, see movie picks) was the result of a partnership between the Moroccan public broadcaster and Ministry of Communication, who joined forces with one of the country's leading production companies to produce more than 42 feature films over five years in order to promote genre film production.

Imagine if the SABC had made just one movie a month since 1994. We'd have more than 200 films of all genres, tastes and ethnicities. Then we might have a real industry, and a national cinema identity.

Worsdale festival picks

AT the Busan festival, there were many entries from unheralded emerging regions alongside big-budget flagship projects from Japan and Korea. The festival's opener Vara: A Blessing, a class-traversing forbidden love story, was shot in Sri Lanka and directed by Bhutanese Buddhist monk Khyentse Norbu. Remote Control, the debut feature of Mongolia's Byamba Sakhya, about an alienated teen who believes he can connect with a woman in another apartment block by using a TV remote, won one of the grand prizes.

There were others that impressed, such as the Iranian movie Fish & Cat, about a group of students from Tehran on holiday near the Caspian Sea, who meet a trio of chefs who enjoy serving human meat. Evidently inspired by a true story, it plays out in one single, epic, bravura shot.

The Lunchbox is a winningly improbable romance about a widower and a lonely housewife who meet when a lunch delivery goes wrong. The triumph of the film is how it showcases Mumbai, the world's fourth most densely populated city, and the world of dabbawallahs, Mumbai's 5000 lunchbox-delivery men.

I kept on wondering why we don't have access to these films back home and, more importantly, why we aren't making films like these. How about a film that showcased Johannesburg with a simple story set in the world of taxi operators? Or a romance set around the annual reed dance? Why is it always in the Karoo or the ganglands?

Hany Abu-Assad's Omar, which was Oscar-nominated this year and opened the Dubai film festival, is a Romeo and Juliet-type story that is both thrilling and heartbreaking as it sets its story about love, trust and betrayal around a wall that splits up neighbourhoods and lovers. The film says the wall is not between Palestine and Israel, but is designed to keep Palestinians apart. It's a deeply political movie that plays out as nail-biting entertainment.

One of my favourite films was Hicham Lasri's They Are the Dogs, a provocative Kafkaesque political satire about a TV crew in Casablanca doing an insert on the Arab Spring. They discover a dazed man who was detained 30 years ago has just been freed and they help to get him home. Shot entirely from the news camera's point of view, it's political and ironic but also fiercely entertaining.

.Festival Scope has programming from selected festivals around the world to view online. You just have to pose as a film professional, which a lot of people I know do, and pay à9 (R131.27) a month or à70 (R1020) a year for membership.

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