When South African filmmaker Lebogang Rasethaba set out to study his craft he
kept one philosophy in mind – taking a step back from your immediate world can
allow you an entirely new perspective on it. After completing his filmmaking degree
in China, he returned to South Africa to direct compelling documentaries and
commercials, and is constantly searching for stories with grit, filming locations that
steer away from stereotypical imagery; and authentic themes.
Lebogang Rasethaba aims to encourage filmmakers to reach further than the
refurbished districts of Maboneng and Braamfontein for shooting locations and
narrative inspiration. Screen Africa’s Carly Barnes accompanied the Jozi local on an
excursion to the less explored corners of the city, which offer a smorgasbord of
texture, history and stories that you just can’t make up.
Rasethaba comments: “Cinema is a powerful tool, it can attach a sense of
importance to an image; it can breathe life into a space and charge it with it a
certain type of energy. Only when we start documenting every corner of
Johannesburg with an equal amount of respect and honour, will all the corners of
our city come together and form part of the same narrative.’
Bertrams
As we drive into Bertrams, a residential area behind Ellis Park stadium, Rasethaba
jokes that it’s “the area Die Antwoord want people to believe they are from.’ Not a
minute goes by without one of us pointing out a possible script premise or a unique
character for a story. A burst pipe in the middle of the road will no doubt provide
hours of playtime when the nearby school bell rings, a white-owned spaza shop
doubles up as a tattoo parlour and three youngsters with too much time on their
hands glare at us ominously from their stoep.
Hillbrow
As we arrive in Rasethaba’s childhood home in Hillbrow, a woman emerges from a
pile of discarded belongings on the pavement. Before being evicted she had lived in
the building, and remembers Rasethaba and his family. We leave the same way we
arrived; obvious outsiders with only a souvenir of modern inner city living in our
minds. Looking into the rear-view mirror I can’t help wonder what kind of cinematic
treasures might be lying dormant, beneath the paint-peeled walls of these empty
structures.
Yeoville
Driving into Rockey Street and approaching the Central African Food Market, I find it
nearly impossible to imagine the stories my mother has told me of clubbing and
coffee shops in the then trendy suburb of Yeoville. We are surrounded by
contradiction; Jacaranda trees that peer down on utter chaos, familiar smells that
intertwine with those of exotic foreign fruits and spices and just beyond the taxi
rank, a park with jungle gyms and playing children. Adjusting to the sensory
overload, I think about how contrasts like these could present the opportunity for
unique characterisation, interesting narrative tension and rich visual complexity.
