Born out of hope
In Berlin to support Les Blair's film Jump the Gun, stars Michele Burgers and Rapulana Seiphemo have found themselves talking more about its location
They make an unlikely pair. She - Michele Burgers, maybe already familiar to festival audiences for her roles in Elaine Proctor's Friends and Souleymane Cissé's Waati - severely dressed, very straight black hair, not a sign of the curls and the tattoos and the flamboyance that mark her performance in Jump the Gun.
And, while she seems much taller than Minnie in the film, he - Rapulana Seiphemo, who has studied abroad (in Texas) and toured the UK and Canada in a production of Athol Fugard's My Children, My Africa - is far more compact, more casually dressed, with very close-cropped hair and a deep, infectious laugh that it is almost tempting to call a giggle. Again, a far cry from the buttoned-down black yuppie, Thabo, a networker whose inspiration is that the head of Sony Records is also black.
In the most obvious sense, they are thrown together here, doing the circuit as a double-act, because they have come to Berlin to represent Jump the Gun, along with its British director, Les Blair. But events in South Africa have also, in a sense, thrown them together - much as their paths cross in the film, - in a way in which neither would have predicted half a decade ago.
'The new South Africa, was born out of hope,' he says. 'I wouldn't be here, she wouldn't be here if it weren't for that hope, wishing for a better life.'
'Yeah,' she says. It is almost a 'Ja': she has a tendency to slip into Afrikaans, much as all the characters in the film slip in and out of languages, sometimes in mid-sentence, like a Filipino newspaper. 'I find that most people are incredibly optimistic and they are really determined to make it work.'
'There's nowhere else to go but up, you know?' he says, somewhat finally.
Both are now resigned to the fact that, despite being professional stage and movie actors with careers of some standing, they are being asked more questions here about South Africa than they are about the film.'
Given the history of South Africa, you cannot escape that,' he says. 'Whatever you do, you have to care enough. And that is what is interesting to people. So, definitely, yes, we have answered more questions about South Africa and about the situation there than about the film. But, you know, even in the film, there is no way that you can escape that.'
'I think what I believe,' she says, 'is not that it's trying to make a point in certain scenes. It's just there in the background.'
And indeed it is. Shot on location in Johannesburg, much of it in the high-crime, city-centre area of Hillbrow, Jump the Gun is the most direct, intimate, head-on portrait of life in the new South Africa yet to reach the rest of the world. The miracle, though, is that it is not harsh and issue-oriented, but gentle and funny, a movie about people in South Africa, not a movie about South Africa itself.
It is the work of Les Blair, working with the production company (Parallax), which also embraces Ken Loach. And inevitably - unfairly - every mention of Jump the Gun in the press is going to be preceded by a sentence saying that it is made by a British director, an outsider.
This is beside the point, say Michele and Rapulana ('It doesn't mean anything,' he says, slightly irritated at being asked yet again what the name means, as though all black South Africans must be named after waterfalls or sunsets or birds of prey. 'My Dad gave it me. It's just a name'). They are adamant that it is their story, that the characters are all based on people they know, that it is born out of their improvisations, structured by Blair into a story.'
What's unique about this film,' he says, 'is the fact that Les came into South Africa with an open mind. He told us he didn't know anything about South Africa and he wanted to write something, a story, about contemporary Johannesburg. He invited us to create the feelings. We worked from nothing, through improvisations and building characters that we knew personally. It's more our story than his story, you know.
'Our film industry is still in its infancy. Well, there was an industry before, but it didn't incorporate the majority of the people living in South Africa. Trying to come up with an industry, running the thing for everybody, is a process, not an event.'
The film has yet to open commercially in South Africa. 'But the overriding feel is that this was an important movie for the South African film industry, and they were incredibly excited about it,' she says. 'It's an honest reflection, too: there were no compromises. And I've never experienced that before.' Me neither.
Oh, and any colleague who stops me at a festival in, say, five years' time and can say with sincerity 'Whatever happened to Michele Burgers?', I'll buy them a drink. The lady's a star.
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