Jahmil XT Qubeka has become one of the most recognisable names in the SA film industry.

At the 2013 Durban International Film Festival, his movie Of Good Report caught a lot of traction for its subject matter. So much so that it was infamously banned for “child pornography”.

In response, the filmmaker arrived at the screening with his mouth taped as a sign of protest.

Nearly 10 years later, the movie finally gets the premiere it deserves at the 5th Africa Rise International Film Festival (ARIFF) and it’s a moment Qubeka finds worthy of celebration.

After a delay that allowed him enough time for us to laugh about the Argentina vs Saudi Arabia soccer World Cup upset, we dive into his movie making comeback and the state of film in SA.

How are you feeling about your movie getting the premiere it deserves?

I feel proud and excited that ARIFF would decide to curate and open with this film by celebrating it this way. Through maladministration and ignorance it was basically deprived of this opportunity to be an opening film.

There has always been an assumption that because this film got the notoriety of the ban, it got free press. But it’s quite a frivolous way of looking at it. From my perspective, it robbed the film of a great opportunity in many ways. It became a banned film and that tag stuck . It created an energy around the project. For a long time I used to resent that but here we are ten years later.

Do you feel there has been enough change in terms of movie classifications locally?

Well, if you look at it 10 years later, there hasn’t been an incident like that since. I believe that there was some kind of corrective measure through this experience. Credit to the Film and Publications Board, they’ve been quite engaging.

A couple of years ago they even invited me to have a talk, it was during the release of Knuckle City, and we spoke around censorship, how it works, their process, the perception and how we feel as filmmakers. That candid experience made me feel positive that they want some growth. The only gripe I have is that South African films are rated more sensitively than their counterparts in America.

Tell us more about that

Excuse my French but for a Zulu boy from Soweto to say “f**k” on film versus an Italian guy in a Scorsese movie, we get more penalised in a sense. The same with any depiction of drug usage or violence, if you have to compare with the ratings of Western or international films you see a little bit of disparity when it comes to local films.

What can be done to prevent productions from getting such harsh reaction from audiences or rating boards?

I just think it’s a natural reaction. For example, and I’m not saying it’s a sex thing, let’s say you’ve got a 41-year-old churchgoing mother whose watching a movie that they have to vet. Her looking at a film with images that closely reflect where she comes is different from how she sees images that are explicit. If you compare that with her seeing images from a foreign film, probably doing more explicit stuff she is going to have a more visceral reaction to the one that she is more familiar with.

We need to be aware of where we are. We only got these freedoms 30 years ago. Even the idea of paving through the canvas of celluloid or film, being able to express ourselves as black people or of colour is a fairly new thing for SA.

It’s the same with our audiences. It means we are the youngest in the game. We are still preoccupied with the tools of filmmaking.

Think of the reaction to Yizo Yizo for example or when Jason kissed the other guy on Generations. There are all these markers in cinema and television that are reflecting an image to us and we are not used to that. Other nations use the very same medium as a cultural exercise.

What do you feel the South African film industry needs to move towards?

Representation. The industry offers so much from a career perspective but all these years later we are still crying out for representation. And that’s going to change form the ground-up to dictate the space.

I always say the youth, it doesn’t matter what it is, need to put themselves in a position where they know enough from a knowledge perspective that someone needs to  pay them for what they know and understand.

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