By Jann Turner (director of "White Wedding," South Africa's official entry for the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language)
(from the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival)
"When we first saw you, we saw white!" Kenny and Raps confessed this to me midst gales of laughter about a year after we started working together on "Isidingo," South Africa's first post-apartheid soap. Kenneth Nkosi and Rapulana Seiphemo were acting on the series, I was one of the directors, and it was while we were toiling together in the soap mine that we became friends. Ours is a relationship of deep trust and loyalty, one of the most important in my life. It's from the obstacles and issues that we've confronted through our triangular, multi-cultural and multi-racial friendship that our first feature film comes. More than a decade after that conversation about my whiteness, the three of us sat down together to write the script for "White Wedding."
"White Wedding" is a comic, romantic take on people encountering one another with all their prejudices in play and being forced by circumstance to find affinities that are liberating and humanizing.
The three of us grew up during apartheid and in very different worlds. I was raised in a family of political activists in white, suburban Cape Town, and later - after my father was assassinated by the Security Police - in England. Kenny and Raps were raised in the khasi (township/ghetto), they are both Soweto born and bred, and they grew up with the crude brutality of racism in all facets of their lives. Our early careers were focused on work that related to our changing society, with subject matter that was often of necessity very dark and heavy. "White Wedding" marked a significant departure, and the move into comedy was both liberating and exciting for us. South Africans have repeatedly called the film "refreshing" because it shows our country as it is now and not as it was.
Not that we should forget our past - far from it - all three of us are formed and scarred by it. But I firmly believe that our painful memories should be balanced with joy in the new nation we have created.
South Africa has 11 official languages. Most people here speak in a seamless mix of several and often switch from one to another without skipping a beat. We use language to exclude and include one another, and in the writing of "White Wedding" we felt the dialogue had to be spoken in the languages of the characters - that is Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Afrikaans and even French.
We cast a Xhosa actress for the role of Ayanda, the Xhosa bride whose mother is not so sure about the "uncut" (uncircumcised) Zulu man her husband is intent on marrying. For Rose, the lost English hitchhiker, we felt that we had to have an English actress, someone who could bring to the part the surprise and amazement that foreigners feel when they encounter our beautiful, complicated, crazy country.
I printed up a set of pictures of the hot, young British actresses listed on IMDb, and both Kenny and Raps pointed to Jodie Whittaker as the girl they wanted for Rose. So I went to London to find her. Incredibly, we got her. Jodie instantly became part of our family and her professionalism and energy contributed to the wonderful atmosphere on set.
Above all, "White Wedding" is a family enterprise. With Ken Follett (my step-father) as executive director, and close friends and colleagues in the cast and crew, we had a team that was relaxed, hard working and efficient. We shot the film in 18 days, with a budget of under a million dollars.
We premiered the film in Johannesburg last April, and our opening weekend pulled double the box office taken by "Tsotsi" on its first South African outing. The response from local audiences has been amazing. I've stood at the back of the theater holding tight to Raps' and Kenny's hands as the audience rose to its feet stomping and shouting and applauding, and I've danced in the aisles with strangers as the credits rolled.
We tried to make the film true to the way we think, speak and behave - and the result is a madcap, multilingual adventure with many layers of humor and irony. Very much like living in South Africa today.
More info on White Wedding...
