The Getz Files

I'm not generally much of a film festival person. I used to be when I was younger, but have become somewhat disenchanted with them for a couple of reasons. First, your chance of seeing a really crap movie is pretty high. Second, they're just movies. I know that may sound heretical, but experientially there really isn't much of a difference between seeing a movie under regular circumstances and seeing one at a festival, except, as I said, for the higher likelihood of seeing a bad movie at the festival.

Nevertheless, there can be something to being surrounded by loads of (other?) pretentious people who want to look as if they care about art. And occasionally film festivals have interesting programmes. Hence, I found myself a few weeks ago at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. I had a particular purpose, however. The festival has an annual series of "Hot Spots", showcasing three cities where exciting (or whatever) movies are made. This year, the cities were Vilnius, Mexico City and Jo'burg - so I had to go and represent. (Interestingly, if I'm from Jo'burg and my ancestors are from Vilnius or thereabouts, where does Mexico City fit in the picture?)

The evening I went to was a bunch of short films, chats with the artistes (emphasis on the e) and a couple live poetry/rap/spoken word/music performances. And oy, were some of them bad. Peter van Heerden's So is n' Os Gemaak featured him hanging naked, hairy and dirty from a kind of scaffold by the Settler Monument in Grahamstown. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how good some of them were, particularly a 2-minute film about Lady Godiva, and Jaco Bouwer's I Love You Jet Li, which was a very funny narrative about a girl who falls in love with Jet Li and flies to China to find him, with filming of Jan Smuts Johannesburg International Airport*. Good poetry and singing from Ntsiki Mazwai and Shamiel X, who did a long diatribe on hip-hop. The first part, what hip-hop is not, was great fun, pacy, inventive, energetic, iconoclastic. But the second half, what hip hop is, was so right-on, "inclusive" and unthinkingly kneejerk leftie it made me want to throw up. Actual line: Hip hop is honouring indigenous people. (I guess that's where "hip" comes from; maybe "hop" stands for helping old people.)

Anyway, my point is that film festivals and short films aren't unremittingly awful. And that some people are better at saying what they oppose than what they stand for (ie, me).

* On renaming in South Africa, see above.