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:
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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.
