By Kwanele Sosibo
“There was no film industry when I was in high school and there were no filmmakers to aspire to be like,” says director John Barker when I ask him about his entry into the film industry. “Everything was censored back then anyway so you couldn’t really make a film like Bunny Chow.”
What Barker, an art major in high school, is referring to here, is probably not the sex, drugs and rock ’n roll that stitches the deliberate narrative of this movie together, but that his film sort of circumnavigates some of the pressures filmmakers put on themselves in this country’s budding industry; you know the pressure to make grandiose films that centre on apartheid with or make a pantomime out of a nursery rhyme.
“What Bunny Chow is doing, is it’s saying you don’t have to have a story that’s about an epic moment in South Africa,” he continues. “[What you have now] is the same old people doing the same old genres and they are political and angst-driven. Anything outside of that suffers [funding wise]”.
Bunny Chow, which won Barker the Lionel Ngakane Award for Most Promising Filmmaker and one of its stars, Kagiso Lediga, the joint best actor award at the Cape Town World Cinema Festival, is a simple story about a bunch of comedians on the road to a gig at Oppikoppi. Before, during and after the trip, they share some hilarious moments and a few tragic ones.
Comedians, after all, need the tragedy to create the comedy. The gags, the pithy musings that pepper their conversations and the setting probably reveal a whole lot more about South Africa than any pedantic period piece or news bulletin ever could.
Made with virtually no budget except for a bunch of very dependable volunteers, the movie - cloaked in an otherworldly black and white tint and wittily edited - is ingeniously executed and refreshingly unfettered. The world has noticed too.
MTV Films Europe along with DV8 Films’ sales arm Deviant Selling has hopped on the bandwagon, handling world sales. The Rotterdam Film Festival is the last in a queue of major film fests to have validated the film earlier this year, after a buzz that took off while it was being edited for free at Terraplane Studios.
It may be just the flick to open the floodgates for similar local product that, as one Screen International critic put it, “shows the middle finger to the country’s apartheid past”.
Although currently directing traffic at this country’s film crossroads, Barker’s entry into the industry some ten years ago was a deviation from his original plans.
“When I qualified I went to Cape Town to look for work with my graphic design portfolio,” he remembers. “It was naïve of me to think I could get a job in two months to pay rent. So I ended up joining a film set as a runner to make some money and I absolutely loved it. My first day on the set, I ran past the arts department and the art director asked me to mix paint and he was quite impressed. So for the next six months I worked in the arts department, as an assistant to the art director. When the season was finished I went to London to look for work in the film industry. I struggled there because it was competitive. So in between I worked as a waiter making sandwiches until I found work as an assistant on the BBC’s Big Breakfast Show around 1998.”
A grinding resourceful type, Barker used some borrowed props and a cameraman roomie to make a forgettable little film about screwed up bicycle riding thugs called Rasta Dogs, before returning to pass himself off as a director. He landed up at Channel O, where he basically taught himself how to shoot, edit and direct.
“I chose locations and I worked with actors who were working as presenters like Tumisho Masha, Fat Joe and Hlomla Dandala. They were very creative and we had a lot of fun. I was given creative freedom to do a lot of things,” he remembers. “I would suggest to people to go to film school but there is nothing wrong with learning it yourself.”
In 2001, after roughly three years at Channel O, Barker parlayed his stockpiled knowledge into several freelance projects, which included camera work for the South African Music Awards, music videos, inserts for the Phat Joe Show and documentary making with Black Rage Productions. This flowed into Blu Cheez, a mockumentary about a bunch of self-important geek rockers.
“All this time [I was making doccies]; I was learning how to tell stories because I always tell myself: “This is not what I’m going to do forever but I’m going to learn what I can from it”. So I mimicked all the stuff we were doing and I decided to make it more humorous. It was picked up by M-Net and they flighted it a lot [in 2003] which was a surprise. It opened up a lot of doors for me in the industry.”
However, it was the Pure Monate Show’s often improvised and risqué sketches that laid the groundwork for the formation of Dog Pack films, and ultimately, Bunny Chow. “Kagiso (Lediga) drew up the Pure Monate Show,” recalls Barker, who acted and directed the first episode before joining the second season in 2005 as a director.
“That was Kagiso’s thing that he wanted different writers [on the show], like in the States, whereas here we try to save on writers. I was one of the writers and it’s good to write and direct at the same time because you can see immediately what works and what doesn’t. The experiences from that ensemble set up gave me a lot of confidence to forge ahead with Bunny Chow. It’s difficult to go on the road and shoot a film at a rock festival with all these huge egos and with Pure Monate that’s what we did everyday.”
Produced by Lediga and Leanne Callanan and written by Barker along with comedian David Kibuuka under the Dog Pack Films’ banner, Bunny Chow’s success will give impetus to the company’s other projects, like the upcoming carnival-referencing The Umbrella Man, about a bank robbery in Cape Town and the Pure Monate spin-off The Dictator, which is already in script form.
As we’ve come to expect, they will most likely be inventive, simple and entertaining. “People want to see me and you, your relationship to your girlfriend, the South African accents, you being in love with the girl that dissed you for your neighbour,” proffers Barker.
“Like the movie Number 10 [for example], “I bet you they saw Any Given Sunday and thought lets make our own version. That’s crazy. That’s $100 million and you have like R10 million. I think people have to watch more Woody Allen films where it’s just about characters and you just have to write.”
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