Raeburn Featured In The Times

South Africa's daily Times newspaper interviewed Michael Raeburn about his film Triomf. Check out the November 2nd article here and read a little bit of the introduction:

STRAIGHT TALKER: Filmmaker Michael Raeburn struggled to get funding for ’Triomf’ because he refused to compromise the story Picture: ALON SKUY

Triomf has a universal quality, poverty is dramatic. The context is a metaphor, it’s the end of one world and the beginning of another

Michael Raeburn has a default personality trait — he is nothing if not tenacious, writes Aspasia Karras.

It’s raining like it’s monsoon season in Bombay the night I meet Michael Raeburn. It’s Sunday and he is on the phone to a French post production house in another room of the small house in Westdene where he is holed up for the filming of Triomf, based on Marlene Van Niekerk’s prize-winning novel about a dysfunctional poor white family on the eve of the 1994 elections.

Each room hums with the mysterious activities performed by the myriad people that populate the final credits of any film. Its a labour-intensive industry even on a Sunday night.

“Just don’t call me a British film maker,” he says when he emerges. “I am from Zimbabwe.” That fact alone could fill up several columns of this article, suffice it to say that he is less upbeat about his homeland than he was in 1993 when he made Jit a comedy that captured his hopes for the future of the country from which he had been expelled by Ian Smith for his hard-hitting film Rhodesia Countdown.

Thirty years later he made Zimbabwe Countdown questioning Robert Mugabe’s betrayal of the liberation war and documenting his own dismay at the unravelling state of his nation. “It’s a catastrophe,” he says with an air of finality, as he settles down on the couch to chat with me.

Lesbian Suitcases, Welding Visors and Headless Cats

It seems like the Triomf production crew can finally take off their wellies and get some shooting done. It was also discovered that it is not beneath Triomf's director, Michael Raeburn, to get down on his hands and knees to coax a wayward actor (a dog who needed to be more vicious). This report came in from Alex Pearse late last night:

After three weeks of relentless rain, Jo'burg finally came aglow with the kind of scorching summer day it is famous for. Needless to say, the cast and crew of Triomf were more than relieved that the weather lottery looked to be ending and that the important job at hand could continue.

So it was smiles all round at 6:30, the damp atmosphere at breakfast having been replaced with some kind of enthusiasm (well, as much as is possible at that hour.)

It was good that spirits were high, such was the scale of the task at hand. With eight scenes to shoot and a host of actors and extras to coordinate, Day 20 promised to be one of the biggest yet. Just a quick glance at the props list - lesbian suitcases, cat without a head and Lambert's welding visor - tells its own story.

Recreating early nineties South Africa is a deceptively challenging task because unlike a period drama where everything needs to be recreated and the lines between what is real and what is not are very clear, the recent past and the present blur into each other, yet also include a number of very stark differences.

Negotiating this challenge has been a major task for Triomf's Art Department and today proved to be their day in more than one way: AWB campaigners on horseback, rag and bone men, a couple moving house - all meant wardrobe and props standby were working off their feet. It all came together nicely though, under Michael Raeburn`s fastidious eye, DOP Jamie Ramsay brought it all to life.

It wasn't all work-work though - the day had its lighter moments too. In particular, the crew's attempts to get Producer Natalie Stange's dog (playing the role of obnoxious neighbor Beer Guts' pet) to shake off its docile demeanor and play vicious (or at least bark), was something to behold. Not one to let his troops do all the hard work, Director Michael Raeburn got down on his own haunches and tried to coax an award winning performance out of the beast. (Notice the dog's nose sticking menacingly through the bars in between Michael's legs.)


With a glorious highveld sunset telling us the lighting department was about to stand down, First AD Grant Nale called it a day. With the shadows getting longer by the minute, we wrapped and packed, with cold beer, good wine and something other than the set's staples of chicken and rice on everyone's minds!

Triomf Movie Rehearsal - Watch the Video

For those of you who have been looking forward to details about the Triomf production process, take a look at this clip taken during rehearsals.

On the left you see LIONEL NEWTON playing the character Treppie and on the right you see EDUAN VAN JAARSFELDT playing Lambert.

Michael Raeburn is directing them.



The actual shoot starts in Johannesburg Sept 25 - November 3. Wish us luck!

For email alerts each time we upload a new video clip, click on the links to subscribe to RedPillPictures and Triomf Movie YouTube accounts.

Location Recce - Sunday August 26

This past Sunday Michael took a small group of us out to the film's main location - a small house in Jan Hofmeyer Park in Brixton - to discuss various aspects of the shoot. Art director Tiaan van Tonder got the opportunity to see how much work he would have to do to get the place looking the way Michael wants it to. Our DOP Jamie Ramsay got to see the dark & cramped spaces in which he would have to shoot for around 5 weeks. Michael and Natalie spoke to the homeowners - Ernest, his sister Doreen and her truck driver husband - about the alternative living arrangments being made for them for the duration of the shoot: they will move into a caravan that will be placed in their neighbours' backyard. In the meantime, I shot lots of material for the film's "Making of...", and we all marvelled at how closely the entire place - the home where we will shoot, the surrounding neighbourhood and its inhabitants, even the mangy dogs - resembled exactly Marlene van Niekerk's description of the place in her novel.

The effects of grinding poverty are everywhere visible, from the mud-soaked and rubbish-strewn backyard, to the men and women lurching drunkenly across the open field at 11am, to the skinny dirt-covered kids playing with home-made wire toys in the dusty streets.

Now while there are many communities in South Africa that have failed to find their place under the warm sun of the new democratic South Africa, there is something about this place that sets it apart from every other: one has the sense of a place that has truly fallen off the edge of the world. There is not the slightest ounce of hope in these streets.

But I'm quite certain the film will change all that: the homeowners - Ernest & co. - are sweet and humble people, but already they are utterly gobsmacked that their home is to become the prime location for an international feature film. They are talkative and curious and surprised at the fact that anyone would want to point a camera in their direction. Although the other residents mostly ignored us on Sunday, this too will change once cast and crew start moving in and causing a commotion. Then we can expect crowds of curious onlookers. The countdown has begun...

"Giddily Upbeat," Says The New York Times

As something of a follow-up, we wanted to include a little more about Michael Raeburn and Zimbabwe. In 1991, he made a movie called Jit. (Among its many distinctions, perhaps even beyond the fact that it was the first feature film ever made in Zimbabwe, it is extremely high on the Marquee Letterer And Ladder Shifter's Union Special Achievement Award shortlist of Shortest Film Titles Ever, though nosed out at the finish line by by It).

In any case, not only did Jit serve as the film launch-pad for Oliver Mtukudzi, perhaps Africa's biggest World Music star today, it also was shockingly available in the US at Blockbuster Video. Not, admittedly, perhaps every Blockbuster Video in the entire United States of America, but still....

Just imagine -- there you could be, of a Tuesday night back in the mid-1990s, when people still went to video stores instead of doing all the astonishingly illegal -- and convenient! -- things they do to get their movies today, and you would be trolling the aisles amongst all the other sad Tuesday night consumers with their Burger King bags under their arms, trying to take advantage of Blockbuster's "Three-For-One Tuesday" deal but all the big Hollywood star-laden car-crashing action-comedy just-released-to-video spectaculars are sadly not in evidence on the shelves. And your Burger King bag is starting to drip. To a degree, in fact, that suggests that its structural integrity is about to give way right there on the lush (but stainproof) blue Blockbuster carpeting. So, as an emergency measure you wouldn't take under any other circumstances, you grab -- in addition to Dumb And Dumber II and some movie you chose because Adam Sandler was on the cover, so it must be really funny -- a bright orange-and-green covered box that clashes noisily against Blockbuster's blindingly jaunty yellow-and-blue corporate color scheme) belonging to some movie with the wacky, zany title of Jit.

And "Wacky" it is . And perhaps even "Zany" too, though not in the blockbusting Adam Sandler manner. It's wacky and zany in the sense that the hero of the film, an under-achieving but ambitious striver named UK, is chided and counseled and very actively assisted by a Jukwa, an ancestral spirit, in this case in the form of a beer-chugging granny. It's wacky and zany as well in the sense that somehow, some way, somebody at Blockbuster made a deal to buy just enough VHS tape copies of Jit to make sure the movie actually skidded into the black.

It's not retroactive for 1990, but just to keep you honest here, we've included this link to a highly useful Zimbabwean currency counter, so you can compare your own local shekels to the Zimbabwean Dollar (ZWD) as it floats giddily toward the stratosphere, sort of like the first African Mission to Mars. There are all manners and degrees of wacky and zany, after all. And as long as its not your life savings going down the drain, hey, what could be zanier than the Zimbawean dollar in 2007?

A Disturbing Thought Or Two

A deeply disturbing thought suddenly occurs: Michael Raeburn, distinguished director of Triomf, the film that is surely going to be one of the most talked-about South African films of our time, is another of those infernal immigrants from Zimbabwe. Zounds!

Let's face it: no matter what internal problems all South Africans share, one thing everybody there ought to be able to agree upon is the simple and straightforward idea of building a massive, unbreachable, impenetrable, unscalable wall all across the entirety of the Zimbabwean border. Preferably financed by the United States, using technology, know-how, and leftover spare parts from the USA's own re-Berlin-ificaton of the Mexican border. Which is scheduled to be completed weeks after we sign off on Mission Accomplished II: The Sequel in Iran (Oops -- I meant Iraq; we Americans have trouble keep you foreign lands straight.) (In any meaning of the word.)

Now, as a native-born American of sturdy, unswarthy European stock, whose forebears on either side of the family arrived almost entire decades before the last half of the Twentieth Century, there's nothing that irritates me like illegal immigrants. Not to say that Michael, whose work permits are every bit as in order as the rest of the production's, is illegal, but still....

Well, now that I've got that pot properly stirred, I'd like to move on to other profound thoughts Zimbabwean....because some Americans, if you haven't heard, are about to become minor experts on the place. A couple few weeks ago, we sat around Michael's ultra-chic Parisian flat in its fashionable district (okay, his chic Parisian flat in its questionable neighborhood) (alright, ok, his funky but entirely serviceable flat... but it's damn well in Paris) while I showed Jose' [Triomf's sound engineer] and Michael the website counting down the last few hours before the Dispatch concerts at Madison Square Garden benefiting Zimbabwe. I'll go into more detail about that and those shows in times to come but both Michael and Jose', who's originally from Mozambique, raised the worthy question of "How do they get the money they've raised to the people who need it most, instead of the people who figure they need it most because they're running the country?"

Dispatch, a band hardly anybody over the age of 30 outside of New England had ever heard of, and one that had been broken up for three years, decided they were going to reunite long enough to do a benefit show for the people of Zimbabwe. As things fell together, the show ended up being scheduled for New York City's Madison Square Garden, and it sold out within minutes of tickets being put on sale. So a second and then a third night were put on sale, both of which sold out instantly as well. The band turned over their own guest list tickets in order to raise more funds, and some pretty significant sums were raised. And the question of how to disburse those funds is central, obviously.

But as anyone who's ever been around a successful benefit knows, a huge part of it is not based in fund-raising but in consciousness-raising.... There are now a couple of hundred thousand American kids (consider exactly how fast those tickets sold out, and do a little math based on those lucky ticket holders actively bragging to all their friends, and multiply by Myspace....) who now know at least a little something about a remote Southern African country named Zimbabwe..... Okay, now all the Americans say it in unison: ZIM - BOB - WAY ....

Which brings us back again to Triomf and South Africa and Michael Raeburn, all by way of Zimbabwe. Because as we explore the nuances and the crashing non-nuanced plain-as-day non-subtleties of the making of Triomf in South Africa at this moment, we're inevitably going to run afoul of all manner of sensibilities, delicate and refined, crude and rude. And as we do, we're going to keep reminding you of a few important facts. Beginning in the 1960s, under Ian Smith's Rhodesian regime, Michael Raeburn, a native born African who would most often be defined as "white," began making films and books that powerfully questioned the status quo. As each decade's events unfolded, he continued to do so, despite the fact that he was now banned from his native land. And when that land became known as Zimbabwe, one of his books became a primary text in its schools. His film Jit, with the music of Oliver Mtukudzi, Thomas Mapfumo, and the Bhundu Boys among others, was the first film ever made entirely in Zimbabwe. And by the time of our own decade, Michael had once again been banned from his homeland for making a film, Zimbabwe Countdown, that examined the regime that has ruled Zimbabwe since its promising birth.

We bring this forward not to blast forth Michael's horn on his behalf but because it needs to be said. Consistently, in five different decades, this African filmmaker has made films about Africa in Africa. When he wasn't allowed in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, he made them in Tanzania, Zambia, and South Africa. When he wasn't allowed to complete a South African film named Soweto, he moved on and made others. And now, in a time when many people would question his wisdom, he's preparing to shoot a South African picture called Triomf about a lower-class white Afrikaans-speaking family who may not be the model citizens some might wish. Do you think he has any idea what he's doing?

Red Pill Ramblings

So myself (Ryan) and Natalie are naturally very excited to be involved in the Triomf film. It's our first project together, it's a big one, and so a bit daunting, but we feel we're more than up to the challenge. Not only do we have the requisite skills and experience to make it happen, but it's also a film with exactly the themes we've been talking about ever since we first met. Themes we've felt were sorely lacking in contemporary South African cinema, resulting in anaemic films bloated by political correctness. Anyway, we believe Triomf is about to change all that, so we're going hell for leather! (dunno exactly what that phrase means, but I've always wanted to write it...)

I first met Michael Raeburn last year, at a script workshop in Johannesburg. I sat in on some of the discussion and viewing sessions around Triomf, was impressed by the clips now playing as a trailer on YouTube, but I didn't keep track of the project after that. Fast forward about 10 months and here we are, gearing up to shoot Triomf in a very short while.

The past few weeks have been interesting on several levels. Mention of the film to people not directly involved elicits some strange reactions: Natalie has gotten calls from respected SA directors who cannot believe we're doing the film, and that they are not directing.

Other producers have reacted with a measure of awe: "Wow," they say, "you're really brave to be doing this film." Another said it "had no light." We generally laugh in their faces. Clearly they have not read the script properly, or the book on which it is based. It's one of the funniest scripts I've read in ages, fully of acutely observed South African irony and satire. Of course it's also quite tragic - incest always is - but it's also warm and tender in many places.

I don't know about Natalie, but I've also had other concerns of a more political nature: Triomf places the microscope on a family of white Afrikaners on the very lowest rung of South Africa's socio-economic ladder. Some of the things they get up to are so repulsive that one cannot help, but recoil in horror. Could not my more sensitive Afrikaner friends therefore construe the film as a wilful attack on Afrikaner culture?

Another niggling doubt has been over the "necessity" of making this film at all. My more Black Consciousness friends could easily allege that by helping to make a film that elicits sympathy for poor white Afrikaners, I am complicit in re-inscribing the superiority of whiteness in South Africa?

Both these concerns have been answered by reading the novel, as I've been doing these past few days. Triomf is not about "Afrikaner Culture" understood in its monolithic sense. If culture is survival, it is simply the brutally honest portrayal of one family and how they have managed to survive (just barely) in this topsy-turvy country called South Africa.

My response to the second charge - that Triomf will re-inscribe white superiority - requires the retelling of a personal anecdote brought to mind by my reading of the novel. Some years ago, I was back living in Cape Town, my hometown. My regular route to work took me through St. George's Mall, a thoroughfare frequented by all sorts of Capetonians, including a couple of white beggars, seemingly husband and wife.

One day, in a cheerful and generous mood, I reached out with a few large coins for their begging bowl. Before I could drop my meagre gift, however, the woman pulled the bowl away at lightning speed, and flashed me a dirty look from her bloodshot eyes. I stared at her in shock as it dawned on me then, perhaps for the very first time, exactly how deep white racism goes. Dirt poor as they were, the colour of their skin was still their final refuge from the devil of equality with "the blacks". Since that moment, I have never once given money to a white beggar.

Instead of re-inscribing white racial superiority in South Africa, what Triomf does is to shatter the myth expressed by that beggar woman's reaction. The book and the film say that skin colour doesn't matter at all. We are all human beings, and when things get rough, as they sometimes do, we are all capable of the most extreme behaviour. Perhaps next year, when the film is done, I will be able to give money to white beggars again...

Yet Another Assassination Attempt on Michael Raeburn

Yet another assassination attempt on Michael Raeburn's life by an unidentified assailant.

Wait - this just in...this particular fork-wielding assassin is the distinguished Caroline Chomienne, Déléguation Générale of ALTERMÉDIA, le cinéma autrement, an esteemed film school in Paris, in this case fulfilling her function as film critic.


You can see that she hasn't given up, even in this next picture, as a group of great Triomf minds tried to have an elegant meal at the restaurant atop the Centre George Pompidou in Paris.

From left to right: Lyndon Plant, executive producer, Rachel, Michael Raeburn, director and writer, Caroline (Corday) L'Assassin, and finally co-producer Bruno Daniault, Epoteon Productions, Paris.

Michael Raeburn Field Tests Paris Vélib' Bicycle

Ever the early adapter, Michael Raeburn wanted to be the first to try the new Vélib' bicycles while he was in Paris last week. Vélib' bicycle rental areas were placed all over Paris, in hopes that people would use bikes instead of cars, thus addressing Paris traffic and pollution problems. We are seeing people on these bikes all over town - they were immediately popular.

To rent a bike, all you do is put your credit card or a Vélib' card into the machine and you can rent the bike free for the first 1/2 hour and then for only 1 Euro an hour after that. (Check out the great explanation of how Vélib' works, in English, on the Polly Vous Francais blog.) Since there are so many stations available, with proper planning, you may never have to pay for your ride.

When we were expressing awe about them recently with Jose Baptista, Triomf's sound engineer, he said, "Yes, but you can only use a credit card, or you can get a Vélib' card but you must have a bank account to do so. The rental machines don't take cash or coins. So that means that poor people can't rent them." Interesting point. We tried to rent a bike with an American MasterCard debit card but it didn't work, nor did an American Express card. So we may be out of luck also.

This was Michael's first ride on one of the bikes. He and Lyndon Plant, Triomf's executive producer, used the bikes to get to a meeting with the French accountant for Triomf. Michael customarily bikes all over Paris on a daily basis, whereas Lyndon, who lives in London, was more in the mode of the typical tourist. Both of them ended up quite delighted, a near-universal experience, if the faces of all those riders on the street are to be believed.

Triomf and Michael Raeburn Featured in Southern Suburbs Tatler

Cape Community Newspapers' Southern Suburbs Tatler featured an article written by Toni Stuart about the film production of Triomf. They don't have their articles online but here are some excerpts:

Mr. Raeburn, a filmmaker and author, wrote the script and directs the movie, which tells the story of an Afrikaans family living in Triomf at the time of South Africa's first democratic elections.

"It's a fable about the end of Afrikanerdom. It's a story about this family and it's a story about apartheid. And who survives is the innocent and the sweet. It's the first tragi-comic novel from SA which stab you in the heart and at the same time it makes you roll on the floor (with laughter)," he [Raeburn] says.

...when he read the book he was intrigued by "these weird and intense characters in the claustrophobia of this intense household."

I've uploaded an image of the entire article in the Triomf Picassa photo album so you can take a look at it there.