DURBAN–Sophiatown, 1958. On the outskirts of Johannesburg, as the apartheid police prepare to demolish the community at the heart of black South African cultural and intellectual life, a noto…
Gibson is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who has co-created, produced or directed multiple award-winning TV dramas. He spoke to about the legacy of Sophiatown in contemporary South Africa, the need for South African filmmakers to interrogate the violence they portray onscreen, and his “strange place” as a white filmmaker creating movies and TV series for a young, black audience.
There was a play that some friends of mine were workshopping, and so I joined the workshop and did the research for the play. I just read everything I could, and I found every image that I could. Just part of a broader obsession with the areas that I had been denied. Sophiatown felt like it had a kind of energy, and a complex, cosmopolitan spirit that apartheid had absolutely stamped out. So I suppose it represented for me something that I had a yearning for.
I absolutely had reservations—specifically as a white director. There’s so much black violence in this film. It felt sort of inappropriate. But everybody around me was so keen to make the film, and then I thought, “Well, f**k it. I know I will be criticized.” But I work for a South African audience. The world audience is a secondary audience to me. The people that know me and engage with me are young black South Africans. That’s who my audience is.
Interestingly, in the writing of the film, the rape scene was not in the film. They went off down the passage, and that was it. And one of the producers on the film said, “I think you need to represent that rape.” We shot it, and we were shooting very fast. I shot it quite obliquely. And the actors came to me afterwards, and they said they had a real problem with the fact that it was so oblique.
You had originally planned to make a genre film about a singer, Eve, who takes bloody revenge on the gang that kidnapped her, but in writing the screenplay with scriptwriter Libby Dougherty, the gang leader, Badman, began to take on a more complex role.
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