In January 2005, exactly one week after I left my birth town of Johannesburg to study film in the brighter lights of London, Darrell James Roodt’s earnest AIDS drama “Yesterday” became South Africa’s first Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
Only a month later, the rather better “uCarmen eKhayelitsha” took the Golden Bear at the Berlin fest; again, the country’s first production to take top honors at one of the major festivals. And only a year later, Gavid Hood’s “Tsotsi” went one better than “Yesterday” by taking the Oscar.
By this time, I was beginning to wonder if the movie gods were sending me a sign that I’d picked the wrong country: South Africa’s film industry seemed poised for a crossover explosion. That didn’t quite happen. Hampered by the usual financial constraints of a third-world industry, the country went back to its steady output of provincial lowbrow comedies and not-quite-there dramas, few of them seen beyond its own borders.
Almost five years later, however, something interesting is starting to bubble there again — but this time, it’s not South Africa’s own industry making waves as much as an international cinematic preoccupation with the country and its stories.
It’s a debate that never gets old regarding the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. When is it going to clean house regarding shady rules that seem to fly in the face of what the organization sets out to do each and every year: honor the best in cinematic achievement?