Urban Renewal

Francois Verster’s new film, ‘Sea Point Days’ is alive with all sorts of characters: small people, big people, fat people, thin people, old people, young people, and Sea Point.

Of his films that I have seen to date, namely ‘When the War is Over’, ‘The Mothers’ House’, and now ‘Sea Point Days’, the latest is my favourite. One of the reasons I enjoyed it is because it isn’t overtly political, even though it does try to comment on the change in South African society. I also think it is brave to make such a poetic film, with no clear narrative structure, with no clear main human character, when the overriding concern in South African filmmaking commissions at the moment seems to be a concern for the audience being able to follow an obvious story.

HONESTLY, HOW LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO MAKE THIS FILM?
We first shot right at the end of 2004 and the film was finished in September 2008. But then I made some more changes and it was finally finished in March this year (2009).

WHY DID YOU WANT TO EDIT THIS FILM YOURSELF?
Partly because there was no money for an editor – the edit took nine months – and we only had a budget for an editor for five or six weeks. So the editor came in for a couple of two week stretches. But the main reason was because we couldn’t afford an editor. Also because it was a personal film and it was important that I was part of finding the film language, that is what the storytelling style would be and how the material would fit together and figuring out what the film says. So the edit process becomes an exploration itself and that exploration comes into finality in the edit.

With observational films, you only understand things once you’re editing. You understand people better and situations better in the edit. The clues start fitting together because you get a bird’s eye view of someone’s life over a period of time, which they don’t even have. A long term observational film gives you unusual insight into someone’s life. With this film things were far more loose and far more intuitive and I understood better what I wanted to do through doing the editing myself.

It was an extremely difficult process to edit this film, partly because I’m not an editor, partly because I was working alone for most of it. My producers were not in Cape Town so there was no immediate production process around me. No matter how supportive my producers were, I was alone. The stuff was also too close to the bone for me; and working towards the deadline was tough with a shapeless film that didn’t have a clear narrative and structure.

Sea Point Public Swimming Pool

HOW WAS THE FILM PERSONAL?
It is a very director led film, an essayistic film, where all the issues in the film are my issues – the film deals with whiteness quite a lot, it deals with identity, with nostalgia, the right to nostalgia, empathy and the right to empathy. I guess I wanted to somehow work out, or give shape to some of the contradictions and confusions I feel living in this time and place as a South African, or as a white South African, so there’s a lot of my own family footage. This is in some way my issue with the old ladies in the film, whom you love in the film, but who are also beneficiaries of apartheid.

The whole film is also about finding a voice within a loaded and complicated political and class framework. These issues have become rigidified and it’s hard to take certain debates further because people have strong thoughts – and the whole race and class debate is so loaded – and I thought that through using cinematic means, you could somehow get beyond some of the debates and go deeper and show the nuances and complexities that go a bit deeper, which I think is closer to the truth. If you question your position as a previously, or currently advantaged person, there are certain things where you have the right to comment, so if you listen to Tony Leon commenting on things the government is doing, you cringe and think this is a white person speaking from the position that we’re all equal with equal possibilities … so how can I, as a privileged person, actually speak about these issues, in a way that doesn’t fall into some of the traps.

It’s tricky for white people to speak about certain things because of the history of this country – I feel white people ought to be quite careful about speaking about certain things and with this film I wanted to find ways of saying things. There are a lot of new orthodoxies about what or who is wrong and who is right – and for me it’s about the intersection between race and class and nostalgia. So it’s about how they intersect, and in the film whenever there’s an easy answer, it goes another way – it consciously avoids giving you an easy answer between right and wrong.

WHAT DID YOU HAVE TO LEAVE OUT OF THE FILM?
When I started editing, I made a list of useable sequences and there were about 350 sequences. So, there was a massive amount that was left out. There was no way of prioritising them because there were no main characters and everything relates to everything else. What happened was, e.g. I shot a lot of stuff in a hostel on Sea Point Main Rd, which has subsequently shut down. It was full of unemployed white people, prostitutes trying to make good and foreigners trying to find work. You had a sense of white people on the way down and foreigners on the way up – but then I thought if the point is to be made, it could be made by the rent boys. The rent boys put certain things very succinctly and the scene was outside on the promenade, as opposed to an inside scene; it was also easier to get into the scene from the previous one.

We shot a lot of good material with the rent boys that I left out, there were scenes with kids in the play park that I left out, moments of love and misunderstanding, lots of stuff at the swimming pool that we left out.

Other things we cut out were some of the harsher stuff with Aubrey, when he gets into his prison story with his tattoos – he was quite pornographic and scatological. The stuff of him performing was enough to show that aspect of him and then show the change at the end. We had an amazing scene of a couple in their 60s who were driving along the promenade on a scooter that we had to leave out.