'Flatland' director Jenna Bass on why the film is more than entertainment

24 August 2019 - 08:00 By Claire Keeton
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Director of 'Flatland' Jenna Bass says she loves pushing social justice angles.
Director of 'Flatland' Jenna Bass says she loves pushing social justice angles.
Image: Esa Alexander

Jenna Bass, the director and scriptwriter of Flatland - a female Western selected as one of six finalists to win the Silwerskerm Film Festival in Cape Town this week - has always seen the world through an original lens and had the courage to take chances.

“I’m in awe of Jenna’s work. She has a unique vision: it’s quirky and bizarre and I’m thrilled about Flatland,” says one of the trio of actresses, Nicole Fortuin.

In her film school friend, David Horler, Bass found someone who shared her vision of Flatland and helped it come to life.

“David was the producer for Flatland so I tried to be hands off,” she says, on trusting him.

Flatland was a more traditional way of making films, the way we had trained. I thought it would be restrictive, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would,” says Bass, who has made movies in unconventional ways up to now.

“Time is expensive so we had to do scenes quickly, but we did not sacrifice too much. I found everyone to be very committed. We were working hard together and cooped up together,” she says of the four-week shoot in Beaufort West over May last year.

Horler of Proper Film says: “We made the entire film in six to seven months. We started with post-production while we were still shooting. I don’t think I have ever been so consumed by anything before.

Flatland is more than basic entertainment. It pushes social justice angles hard which can be alienating, but personally I love that,” he says.

Bass explores the complexity of relationships in Flatland and also the Karoo setting, inspired by the time she got snowed in there.

She also exploited this in High Fantasy, a film she made in the Northern Cape on cell phones. But Flatland diverges in style far from High Fantasy and Love the One You’re With (both on Netflix) - both powerful guerrilla collaborations but much harder to watch.

Bass, who is currently collaborating with High Fantasy star Qondiswa James on developing an alternative film curriculum for SA, says of that movie: “It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. We had to do everything. There were not enough resources and there was angst.”

With a maximum of 10 people on set, Love the One You’re With was small too and, as the producer, Bass was involved at almost every level.

The Karoo was foreign to Bass who grew up in Cape Town and attended a Jewish school. “It was a very isolated upbringing for 12 years of my life, with white Jewish people, but at the same time my parents let me do whatever extra murals I wanted.”

Every Saturday she religiously went to the College of Magic - where popular comedian Riaad Moosa also took classes - where she was exposed to a wider spectrum of urban life. She learned there to turn “fantasy into reality” and independence, Bass says.

She worked at children’s parties and restaurants as a magician but wasn’t great, and decided to transplant that magic to film, she says. 

For three years she studied film at AFDA School for the Creative Economy, in Cape Town, where she developed a network of friends, like Horler of Proper Films.

One of Horler’s mentors ended up being one of three co-producers in Europe of Flatland, which he first started trying to finance in 2012.

Bass says: “You find people who will be your people, and I got to make a lot of really bad films at AFDA. That process of failing is so great to get rid of presumptions about what films are. I learnt a lot of what I didn’t want to do,” says Bass.

In 2013, after much hustling since graduation, she got to shoot Love the One You’re With, which won the Best South African feature award at Durban International Film Festival in 2014.

“I was writing scripts but couldn’t get any finance to make them. You see that with young filmmakers all the time,” says Bass. “Then I made a film and proved I could do it. As a privileged white filmmaker, it was really hard to get to that point and those barriers to entry are huge for anyone who does not have that privilege.”

Bass now has her own production company, lectures at CPUT (Cape Peninsula University of Technology) and co-writes scripts for TV. “What I want to focus on most is a new feature film, which is supposed to be a horror-ish movie but I’m finding it hard to find time to work on it.”

At home, when she needs to switch off, she watches the pet dog and cat. “They are more entertaining than television a lot of the time, and I’m teaching the cat to talk,” she says, offhand. “They have a large vocal range and they respond to you: if you replicate a noise, they mirror it back.”

WATCH | The trailer for 'Flatland'

Bass used to work continually but now she tries to make time to relax. “After I graduated, I was not in a good place and I was not able to read. A big part of my mental health is getting back into reading.”

The pile of books next to her bed is eclectic: Japanese poetry, science writing, economics, historical fiction and sci-fi, she says. “They are a mix of things, like my films.”

Even Bass – who feels “you never have enough time to get what you want on film” - says much of Flatland turned out how she had imagined it.


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