South African seventh art: a difficult start
If the first video images in South Africa were shot for newsreels during the Anglo-Boer War (1880-1881), the first feature film made in the country was by Harold Shaw. Called Die Voortrekkers, this Afrikaans-language work was, at the time, especially appreciated by Afrikaners and descendants of the Voortrekkers. Soon, white supremacy was at the heart of all film productions. In the 1930s, the Colonial Film Unit offered educational programs and produced several works glorifying Afrikaners. The American Isidore W. Schlesinger created Schlesinger African Film Productions, a company that controlled the entire film production and exhibition system until 1948, when Schlesinger Production was bought out by 20th Century Fox and, above all, the institution of the apartheid regime by the Afrikaners. From then on, the film industry's only goal was commercial success, aimed at white audiences. From 1956 to 1962, more than sixty fiction films were made, about forty of them in Afrikaans. For a long time, the scissors of Lady Censorship loomed large behind the screen of the dark rooms. Because of the country's strict regime, many of the films are shot outside of Africa. Only films such as Cry, O Beloved Country (1952) by the Austrian Zoltan Korda or the political event Come Back Africa (1959), in which we see the South African singer Miriam Makeba, by Lionel Rogosin, or later The Gods Are Falling on Their Heads (1980) by Jamy Ulys manage to be filmed in the country. The end of apartheid marked the rebirth of South African cinema and the exiles returned. Darrel James, for example, a native of Johannesburg, stirred up theaters with Place of Weeping (1982), an anti-apartheid work that revealed him in the United States, then The Stick (1987), an anti-war film that was banned for two years in his country. Sarafina! (1992) and Cry, O Beloved Country (1995, a remake of Zoltan Korda's eponymous work) received international recognition and were applauded for their political awareness and treatment of subjects related to South Africa.
Post-apartheid cinema
Since the 2000s, South African filmmakers have continued to dazzle international critics. The very political Zola Maseko embodies the new, very enterprising generation of his country's cinema, and has directed such committed works as The Stranger, A Drink in the Passage and, in 2004, the feature film Drum. In 2005, Gavin Hood directed My Name is Tsotsi and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. In 2009, it was District 9 by Neill Blomkamp that took over the box office. While the work has little to do with South Africa, it is nevertheless a metaphor for the apartheid system, with the parking of aliens in ghettos. Since 2015, there has been a resurgence of local film activity that has regularly won international awards: local Afrikaans Die Windpomp, with the Audience Award for Best Foreign Film 2015 from the Long Beach International Film Festival in New York, Thina Sobabili and the Public Choice Award at the 2015 Pan-African Film Festival, and Necktie Youth, which won both the Best South African Film Award and the International Jury Award for Best Director at the Durban Film Festival. More recently, Zola Maseko returns with The Whale Caller (2017), an adaptation of the novel of the same name by South African writer Zakes Mda. Etienne Kallos' The Reapers (2018) shows several regions of KwaZulu-Natal, and director Jenna Bass presents her feature film Flatland at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival in the "Contemporary World Cinema" category. Finally in 2018, John Trengove's The Initiates made news internationally and shocked in his own country. This feature film evokes homosexual relations on the one hand, and on the other, it lifts the veil on an ancestral rite practiced by the Xhosa. As soon as the trailer was released, the film caused a scandal among the Xhosa population, who saw it as the revelation of a secret and an insult to tradition. At the same time, The Initiates was very well received abroad and praised by the critics.
International
South Africa has also become very attractive as a film location. Indeed, there are several cinematographic successes that have not only crossed the South African lands, but also transcribed to the screen the important and painful history of the country. In 1987, the British director Richard Attenborough directed Cry Freedom and set his plot during the period of the 1976 Soweto riots, retracing some of the history of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. Biko is portrayed by Denzel Washington, who a few years later played the famous Malcolm X in the eponymous film directed by Spike Lee in 1992. The film is critically acclaimed internationally, as Blood Diamond in 2006, with Leonardo Di Caprio and Jennifer Connelly. The film, which was shot throughout Africa, was nominated in five categories at the 79th Academy Awards. A year later, Bille August's Goodbye Bafana (2007) starred Joseph Fiennes. Fiennes plays the role of South African James Gregory, the prison guard responsible for Nelson Mandela during his incarceration between 1960 and 1990. Two years later, the famous Morgan Freeman played Mandela in Invictus (2009) by Clint Eastwood. The film is set during the period of the Rugby World Cup that South Africa is organizing in 1995. For his portrayal of the famous "Madiba", Freeman received a nomination for Best Actor at the 2010 Academy Awards, and won the same award at the National Board of Review Awards. In 2013, Idris Elba took over the role of Mandela in Justin Chadwick's Mandela: A Long Road to Freedom. More recently, we note Forgiven (2017), a work about Desmond Tutu (camped by Forest Whitaker), Zulu (2013, Jerome Salle) with Orlando Bloom, as well as Mia and the White Lion (2018) by Gilles de Maistre, where we can see the Timbavati wilderness reserve.
