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.

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...