Cape Town - A group of filmmakers, collectively known as the KinoKadre Community Cinema Circle, are re-imagining, rewriting and reworking cinema, placing community at the heart of its work.
The activist radical collective is preparing to film “Days and Nights of Love and Faya” in Bonteheuwel, a feature film exploring Bonteheuwel’s contribution to the Struggle against apartheid, but also a love story between two activists, asking questions on how to find and keep love among all this “fire”.
The first cycle of filming will commence on January 31 until February 28. Leading roles are performed by Angeline Petersen playing Angeline Willemse and Raees Hermans playing Anton Fransch. The film is expected to be ready by next year.
The collective was formed in 2006, said KinoKadre activist and film storyteller and film creating facilitator Eugene Paramoer with film writer Nhlanhla Masondo in 2006.
“So many of our ideas we couldn't share with our public, our communities, because there was this silencing of black voices and radical black voices and we didn't speak the classical film language and were not interested in speaking in that language, telling those stories, so we then decided rather to try to find accommodation within the system, the institution or as its known the film industry, to create our own circles and spaces and our own work on our own terms so we could be free, experiment.
“We could tell stories and other young radical young black filmmakers that they matter, their voice matters, their craft matters,” says Paramoer.
The film is a teenage love/relationship story set in Bonteheuwel in the 1980s, remembering the struggles and uprisings that took place and re-remembering and celebrating the spirit of the young people who played an integral role and often leading these efforts.
The title for the film was inspired by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s 1978 book called “Days and Nights of Love and War”.
“It's a process film, it’s been in process and it’s trying to also understand how do you make film together and in service of community, so at each point in the filmmaking process we have surrendered and invited community in and seen how that influences the creative process.”
Some of the artists are those who traditionally would not be able to find jobs in the film industry, predominantly young people from Bonteheuwel, Khayelitsha, Belhar and Mfuleni.
Resource gathering and mythology work group facilitator Taryn Mackay said: “For us, our process is about radically expanding the imagination capacity of young people inside South Africa’s most under-resourced and forgotten spaces.”