Click here for new Triomf website

Triomf was released in South Africa in 2008, and went on to win the award for Best SA Film at the Durban International Film Festival.

The most up-to-date information on the film, including trailers and international reviews, can be found at www.triomf-movie.com

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.

Forgotten Afrikaners

Our executive producer, Lyndon Plant, has been in Joburg recently for the shoot. He writes to me from there and his email is below. Please comment on your thoughts regarding the names used to characterize the Benade family. We are interested in your feedback:

Dear Lisa,

I had my laptop stolen in London and did not have backups of my photographs so I am afraid I cannot help any further with photographs. [I had asked him for another one of his beautiful photos to submit to the Beautiful Africa Blog Carnival.]

On a different point, I would like to sound you out about our description of the Benades as white trash. Whilst I accept that white trash is an understood genre (especially in the States), I don't think that it describes the movie's characters well.

In particular, Treppie's intelligence and obsession with science and philosophy, Treppie's disdain for incest, Treppie's and Lambert's 'affinity' to Cleo, Lambert's friendship with Sonnie et al indicate that a different description by us would be appropriate.

I have discussed this matter with some of the actors who consider the use of the genre to be somewhat offensive, unfair and even misleading. I asked them about Afrikaner phrases that they would consider appropriate to describe the Benades or the people I have met in the community that we are filming. They came up with English words like "forgotten," "lost," "close-knit," "protective," "damaged," "deprived," "Afrikaaner underdogs," et al.

I personally like the sound and meaning of "Forgotten Afrikaners" but I would be interested to find out how our internet community who have read the book (and perhaps the author of the book) would describe the Benade family and their community collectively.

Alex has been ill and I returned to Joburg yesterday afternoon from a week's break in Harare. In brief, the weather held out for us [for the filming], although the temperature drop in the evening had Vanessa asking whether she could do the outside burial scene early Thursday evening instead of late Wednesday evening, as she was shivering from the cold.

I returned to the set with stories of a Jan Hofmeyr resident who chased and attacked a crew member and was subsequently picked up by the police in connection with other crime(s), an expensive light blowing, a generator breaking down, the volksie catching fire due to an auto electrical fault and a neighbor who is irate after being woken at 5am by the catering team setting up for breakfast and by the number of crew and cast vehicles parked on an adjacent residential road.

Its time for a cup of strong coffee!

Lyndon

In my research about Triomf, Sophiatown, apartheid and the 1994 first Democratic vote, I get a sense that the human beings referred to as "the poor whites problem," have been first set up and then abandoned by their government. I am not an expert, and invite your comments.

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.

Triomf; The Tower of Babel Re-Titled (Avec Subtitles)

Producer Lyndon Plante brings forward an intriguing point:

"Triomf the movie is now being made with South African, Zimbabwean, French, British, Mozambiquan and American input (that I am aware of)."

It makes us wonder: How many languages do all of us speak? An obvious list would include Afrikaans, English (in its South African, Zimbabwean, American and perhaps even British variants), French, Portuguese, Spanish... and then we up in Jo'burg-sur-la-Seine would love to know if Triomf has anybody aboard fluent in Zulu or Xhosa or Swazi or... well or any of SA's eleven official languages. And what is it like to live in a land not merely official languages, but eleven of 'em.

(As Americans, we consider it our patriotic duty to discourage any speaking of Spanish whatsoever, worldwide, lest our mother tongue be corrupted and we find ourselves, say, at a rodeo out on the chaparral twirling our lariats high atop our cayuses and discover our burritos have been adulterated with too much guacamole and salsa, forcing us to vamoose across la frontera to, peut-être, Quebec.)

In any case, we welcome the day when the Tower of Babel, much like Sophiatown, is officially renamed "Triomf." (And then back again. With an official ceremony. In eleven languages. And then a big braii afterwards. And maybe some dancing.)

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...

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...

Telling The Story of Sophiatown

(Blog Author's Note: Originally published in the Mail & Guardian, this article is one of a number included on this highly informative page that explore the overlapping history of Sophiatown and Triomf.)

Telling the Story of Sophiatown
by Reesha Chibba | Johannesburg, South Africa
Globe & Mail
11 February 2006 09:51

The reclaiming and renaming of Sophiatown, which has had two names for far too long, is a past we dare not forget, said Johannesburg Mayor Amos Masondo on Saturday.

Masondo was speaking at a ceremony to rename Triomf back to Sophiatown, west of Johannesburg.

“Sophiatown is a place with an amazing history and depth. Sophiatown was, in its heyday, the epicentre of politics, jazz and blues in South Africa. It’s renaming is an attempt and effort to tell [its] story,” he said.

Masondo spoke of the suburb being “bulldozed to dust” during the forced removals in 1955, leaving 65 000 residents without homes. They were forcefully removed over the following eight years and dumped in matchbox houses in far away places like Meadowlands, Lenasia, Western Coloured Township (now Westbury) and Noordgesig.

“Sophiatown evokes memories of a vibrant, creative, multicultural community. A place where artists, writers and musicians flourished, against the odds, in an atmosphere of racial tolerance,” he said.

Nandi Mayathula-Khoza, a Johannesburg council member, paid tribute to former African National Congress president, Dr Alfred Xuma, in her speech.

Xuma, who lived in Toby street, was one of the last residents to leave Sophiatown in 1959. Today, his house is one of only two houses that managed to escape the destruction of Sophiatown by the apartheid government.

A heritage plaque honouring Xuma and his wife was unveiled at their former home during the street parade. People dressed up in true 50’s style and jazzed up the streets with their singing and dancing during the street parade after the official ceremony. Everyone rejoiced when the Sophiatown suburb sign was officially unveiled.

Thabo Matsho, an Ekurhuleni councilor who was born in Sophiatown, said there were moments during the street parade when he felt very emotional.

“I felt like knocking on the door [of the house my parents once lived in] and saying, 'My parents lived here. It’s my parents place. I want it back!' But you can’t do that.”

Freda Tangee, a former District Six resident from Cape Town, said she will never forget the time of the forced removals.

“I will never ever get over that. It was terrible and it’s frustrating.”

Tangee said she feels frustrated because she never had the opportunity to carve a better life for herself.

“At 17 I couldn’t even get a job. It was because of the colour of my skin,” she smiles.

She said she felt hesitant to chat to a policemen at the event because she doesn’t trust them anymore. “I don’t know. Should I be friends with the police? They are not part of me anymore. They have become extinct. I forgive, but I never forget,” she said.

Small children with painted faces, colourful striped tops, hats and umbrella’s cluttered the back of Ben Linde’s 1970’s cream bakkie.

“Sophiatown is the best suburb. It’s the best place that I’ve lived in."

(Used by kind permission of Johannesburg News Agency; www.joburg.org.za)

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.