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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

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...

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)