ARTS: Spotlight on Mandela Film

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Feb 12 2007 (IPS) - The 57th International Film Festival in Berlin has got off to a strong start with the South African film Goodbye Bafana on Nelson Mandela’s long incarceration emerging as an early front-runner for honours. In all 26 movies are chasing the top Golden Bear award.

With some 375 films showing in the various sections, and another 700 or so from around the world being bought and sold during the accompanying European Film Market there is plenty of colour and action to be seen in the German capital.

Following the Festival’s world premiere of La Vie En Rose depicting the often tormented life of legendary French singer Edith Piaf, it has been Danish director Bille August’s Goodbye Bafana which has grabbed most media headlines.

After its showing in the competition Sunday, U.S. actor Dennis Haysbert, who plays Mandela, was roundly cheered by some 500 journalists attending the post-film press conference.

Goodby Bafana tells the unvarnished story of the brutal apartheid regime of the Nationalist Party, and Mandela’s 27-year internment with his closest comrades, most of it spent on Robben Island.

Besides Haysbert, who cuts an impressive figure as the legendary Mandela, actor Joseph Fiennes as prison guard James Gregory, and Diane Kruger as Gregory’s wife, also give solid performances in the roles of initially racist white Afrikaners who slowly recognise the injustices and crimes of the white regime.

Answering questions, the North Carolina-born Haysbert, an active campaigner in the battle against AIDS, particularly in South Africa, said that for the role he “read everything about him I could lay my hands on, seen every DVD of his experiences and listened to every major speech he made.”

As for Mandela’s South African accent, he said: “I rehearsed it with my dialogue coach a couple of hours every day. Even on the set and before scenes.”

Haysbert said it had been daunting and intimidating to play “arguably one of the top human beings who ever set foot on this planet, and doing justice to him. I gather he (Mandela) has been sent a DVD of the film, and God, I hope he likes it.”

He revealed that Mandela had had his tear ducts operated on and so was never able to cry. “That meant for me as an actor, as an emotional actor, I could not cry.”

After shooting film episodes in Cape Town, Haysbert said he would return home every night, have a glass of wine and sit down and cry, thinking about Mandela’s 27-year-long internment. He said it was also difficult for him to come to terms with Mandela’s love for people he must have known really hated him.

“And yet, I truly think and believe that he did love them,” said the powerfully built Haysbert.

Joseph Fiennes and Diane Kruger were also warmly applauded by the critics.

“People can be very easily brainwashed and conditioned,” said Fiennes, seeking to explain the racism prevalent in South Africa during the apartheid era. Diane Kruger said she had met Gregory’s widow, Gloria, who was a warm and religious person but “conditioned” by her surroundings during the racist period.

“The Gregorys were an everyday kind of couple at that time. Playing the role of Gloria I had to make her recognisable to people living in South Africa who will be seeing the film. Not to have done so would not have made sense,” she said.

The film is set against a 1968 South African background in which 25 million blacks are ruled by a minority of four million whites, where blacks had no vote, no land rights, and no rights to freedom of movement, to equitable commerce, to housing or to education.

Like most white Afrikaners, James Gregory regards blacks as inferior, lower-class citizens, despite the fact that he grew up also speaking their tribal tongue on a farm in the Transkei. His proficiency in the Xhosa language makes him ideal choice to act as warder in charge of Mandela and his comrades at Robben Island.

Later, however, Gregory grows aware of his own peoples’ wrongdoing, and switches his allegiance from the racist government to the struggle for a “free South Africa”.

With Dennis Haysbert a star as Mandela, other big-name stars in Berlin for the Festival are Ben Kingsley (of the Gandhi film fame), Cate Blanchett, Dame Judy Dench, Sharon Stone, Jennifer Lopez, Spanish-born Antonio Banderas, and U.S. actors Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon.

Damon stars in the U.S. competition entry The Good Shepherd directed by Robert de Nero. The film is woven around the creation of the CIA, and a man prepared to sacrifice everything to protect his country.

Clint Eastwood’s war movie Letters From Iwo Jima starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Nonomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ria Kase and Shidou Nakamura gets screened out of competition in Berlin.

Four films from Asia, two from Latin America and one from Israel along with a large contingent of movies from North America and Europe all compete in the Golden Bear section.

Two Chinese films are among the 29 receiving their world premieres in Berlin. One of them, Tuya’s Marriage by director Wang Quan’an was well received by critics Friday.

The story set in northwest Mongolia is woven around Tuya’s efforts to find a new husband who can take care of both her and her sick ex-husband. “My mother was born in inner Mongolia, not far from the film’s location,” explained director Wang Quanan in Berlin.

“When I learned how local administrators are forcing the shepherds to leave their homelands, I decided to make a film that would record their lifestyle before it all disappears forever,” he said. (END/IPS/EU/AF/WD/CR/AE/IP/HD/CF/SS/07)