SCREEN AFRICA EXCLUSIVE: As part of the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) 2015 screening programme, award-winning director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem had its African debut on 20 July at the Suncoast CineCentre in Durban, South Africa.
Jean-Jacques Annaud is an Academy Award winning French filmmaker who has worked with big-name actors Brad Pitt, Sean Connery and Jude Law, to name a few. The French Institute of South Africa in conjunction with UniFrance and Videovision Entertainment – as part of its efforts to strengthen the links between France and South Africa in the film industry – made it possible for Annaud to be in attendance at the premiere screening of Wolf Totem at DIFF.
“We are pleased that director Annaud who has a string of blockbusters to his name such as Seven Years in Tibet, Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose and The Bear, will be attending the festival.’ says Sanjeev Singh of Videovision Entertainment. “This is great news for Durban, the festival and indeed the film industry as well, as his presence will stimulate the conversation around film-making in the country, on a global level. The French Institute in South Africa and ourselves look forward to hosting him in Durban and giving him a unique South African experience.’
Wolf Totem is the cinematic adaptation of the Chinese best-selling, semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Jiang Rong. Shot in four different locations in Inner Mongolia, the film follows Chen Zhen, a young student from the city of Beijing, who is sent to Inner Mongolia to educate a tribe of nomadic shepherds. The story takes place in 1967, at the height of China’s Cultural Revolution and begins to unfold when Chen Zhen stumbles across a pack of wild wolves. He watches in awe, as the wolves chase a herd of sheep off a cliff, then drag their corpses into a cave. This sparks the protagonist’s fascination with the wolves that inhabit the grasslands, he begins to study them and their relationship with the nomads, even attempting to tame one.
The relationship between man and animal, and the land they both inhabit, is threatened when a representative of the central authority decides to eliminate the wolves from the region. The storyline is a remarkable and captivating contribution to the dialogue surrounding environmentalism and conservation, drawing on themes of nature versus civilisation, as well as the importance of equality and mutual respect between humans and their surroundings.
According to Annaud, the production of Wolf Totem spanned more than three years so that the wolves could be trained from the cub stage. Annaud explains, “We acquired three different packs, they were very tiny, they were given the bottle because wolves are very cautious, they will never fully trust you…we acquired the first pack in 2009 and then we started shooting in 2012 because we had to wait for them to grow into adults.’
What is most astounding is that real animals were used almost entirely, “I shot 98 percent of the film with real animals,’ says Annaud, “All the close ups, the expression you see on the animals faces, that’s real.’ There are some magnificent action sequences, captured spectacularly by DOP Jean-Marie Dreujou, involving wolves, horses, sheep, dogs and humans. CG was used sparingly in a crafty manner to merge the animals in these sequences.
In one of the film’s most fascinating sequences, the camera glides over the snow-covered landscape giving the audience an aerial view of the wolves as they close-in on the panicked horses. “What I used was a very simple trick called split-screen,’ explains Annaud. “I used a drone with the horses, which were choreographed by horsemen in blue around the herd, and then I later removed the men in blue. Thereafter I choreographed the wolves, in the same landscape, and then I merged the two. So what you see are real wolves and real horses, on real grassland, with real snow.’
With Mandarin/Mongolian dialogue and English subtitles, the film achieved box office success in China and France, garnering an excess of US$111 million in China and over US$9 million in France. Wolf Totem has won critical praise globally with prominent entertainment publication, Variety calling the picture a “viscerally powerful drama,’ while online film giant Screen International declared the film to be “a proud throwback in look and spirit to a kind of filmmaking we don’t see much anymore.’
