STEPS For The Future :. (original) (raw)

A short experimental film that looks at issues of blame, fidelity, denial and guilt within the AIDS context. Starting with one HIV+ couple, it follows the path of sexual encounters branching ever outward. In this maze of relationships the inevitable question of responsibility becomes blurred.

Synopsis:

This unusual 'documentary' dramatises the HIV-related issues of blame, trust and responsibility. It also takes a look at preconceptions concerning high-risk groups and how these assumptions not only lead to denial but can even further stigmatise HIV.

We meet Meg, a white woman, who is making a film about the spread of HIV in underdeveloped areas. In a house in Bonteheuwel, a 'coloured' township in Cape Town, Shahied and Felicity are being interviewed. They argue on camera about who is responsible for the fact that they are both HIV-positive. Accusations fly. Meg tries unsuccessfully to calm them down in her bid to trace the line of infection.

The trail leads her and her cameraman to Abdullah Abrahams , a well-respected person in the Bonteheuwel Muslim community. He admits to Meg that he has had affairs, not only with Felicity, but also with another woman called Sharon.

Meg's search takes her to the Bonteheuwel Trading Store where she adds another name, FiFi, to her growing list of partners. Abdullah's wife refuses to shed any light. She tells Meg that the 'blame is with those who sin, not with us".

The trail having gone dead, she goes back to Shahied, who she finds working in a backyard with his shirt off. Besides FiFi, he now adds two girls in Bredasdorp and a white 'chick', Nicky, to the list.

According to Shahied, Nicky had sex with him and his friends Trevor, Jeremy and Kenneth in the back of a truck. Somewhat taken aback, Meg inquires whether they used condoms. Shahied replies that he likes "meat on meat, not plastic on meat". Tired of her questions, he ends the interview. "I'm lucky if I make it past 30," he tells her.

On her way to find Fifi and the others, Meg receives a phone call from her ex-boyfriend. "Leave me alone," she says, "I don't care what you do or did. Cheating bastard."

Back on the trail, first Fifi and then Trevor refuse to talk to her. Trevor pulls out a gun and Meg and her cameraman have to make a run for it. At the nightclub, Bazaar, she has no luck with finding Nicky either.

Increasingly frustrated, Meg ploughs on. Her search takes her to a dismal room in which a man is smoking 'buttons' (crushed Mandrax tablets mixed with marijuana, smoked through a broken off bottle neck). Asked about his experience of hard drugs, he admits to sharing the needle with his mates.

Back at her house, on the verge of tears, Meg receives another call. From her conversation we gather that the woman her 'cheating' ex-boyfriend slept with has tested positive for HIV. He didn't wear a condom. Meg is aghast. She has inadvertently become the subject matter of her own film project.

In the final scene, back where the film started, Shahied asks what difference knowing who to blame makes.

The message of the film hits home. HIV has no boundaries; it is everybody's problem. There is no blame, only personal responsibility.

Director's Biography :

Verster's acclaimed debut as documentary director/producer, Pavement Aristocrats: The Bergies of Cape Town (58 mins, Screen Ventures), was broadcast on SABC3, Canal Plus and YLE-TV2 (Finland), and was screened at numerous international festivals. This programme was winner of the 1999 Avanti Award for Best Documentary and of two Avanti Craft Awards (for Directing and Camerawork), and was runner-up in the 1998 Sithengi Newcomers' Competition.

In 1998 Verster formed Undercurrent Film & Television, a Cape Town-based company that aims to produce quality documentary programmes for local as well as international markets.

The Story of Mbube, a programme on the fate of the most famous song ever to come from Africa (Mbube, which eventually became The Lion Sleeps Tonight), was broadcast as a 12-minute insert on SABC3's But, is it Art? - the insert won two awards at the 1999 Stone Awards ceremony, and is currently in preproduction as a 52-minute documentary called A Lion's Trail for SABC3 and the international market with Rian Malan and Ubuntu/Ice Media.

The Man who would Kill Kitchener, a 26-minute programme on the Boer spy Fritz Joubert Duquesne (who became the FBI's most wanted criminal), was produced for SABC3's Special Assignment slot with Ingrid Gavshon; it won six 1999 Stone Awards, and is being extended into a 52-minute international version with Angel Films and Brook Lapping in London.

The Granite War (26 minutes), which looks at Swiss exploitation of South Africa's natural resources in Mpumalanga, was broadcast on Special Assignment in February 2000.

Director/producer titles also include between-programme inserts for SABC3, inserts for SABC2's Pasella, M-Net's Kwela and Extra Cover, and award-winning news features for SABC News Cape at 6.

Apart from other documentaries at various stages of development, he is currently in production with Entre Chien et Loup, Belgium, on Now... (originally BMW), partly funded by the Soros Open Society Fund, SABC1, and RTBF. This film looks at the after effects of Apartheid in the Western Cape through the story of a teenage guerrilla group from the 1980s.

Directors' Comments:

On one hand, the film is about the dynamics of blame and responsibility within the AIDS context. But it is also about the politics of sexual morality and, more significantly, about the actual relationship between filmmakers and the HIV-positive subjects they are making films about.

It was the first film of this kind I have made, and I learnt a lot. We eventually decided to use only one proper actor - in the attempt to obtain a kind of "documentary realism". All the other players were ordinary people drawn from the community, representing characters they could relate to in some way or other. (Interestingly enough, we had two casting sessions - one via acting and casting agencies, and the other at a school hall in Bonteheuwel, and the latter was endlessly more successful). I found the mix of documentary and dramatic processes quite exciting, and the use of two mini-DV cameras has allowed amazing editing possibilities. Under significant constraints and very unpredictable working conditions, we managed to push through quite well.

Obviously, in other ways, a process such as this forces one to reconsider one's own position regarding the reality of AIDS - it was a surprise to find that the script, once acted out, began at various places to mean something very different from the ideas I had about it originally. Certain easy beliefs fall away, and I think the process that the interviewer in the film goes through does in some way mirror certain broader issues.

I think that the film could potentially challenge certain orthodoxies - old and new - about moral positioning and about filmmaking approaches to the subject itself. The film also aims, if anything, to break the inclusivity/exclusivity status of subjects (or HIV-positive persons) on the one side and the whole "professionally interested" industry on the other. The Shahied character says: "Ons is mos almal mense." The film itself has various comic moments and is edited in a relatively daring and often "fun" manner - which also challenges the approach someone like the Interviewer character might ordinarily follow. Thus, while the HIV / AIDS issue is never trivialised, the film shows that the ordinary codes of representation in this area may themselves be a limiting and stigmatising factor.

Credits:

Production Company Big World Cinema
Director Francois Verster
Producer Platon Trakoshis
Cinematographer Matthys Mocke
Paul Morkel
Sound Jeff Hodd
Editor Steen Schapiro
Sound Editor Stef Albertyn