Cannes Film Market seeks diversity, telco money

by Ian Gabriel. If your interest is around new forms of diverse content generation, this year at Cannes Film Market was definitely the place to be.

Backtrack a few weeks prior to Cannes: I’m sitting in a plush office at a major talent agency in LA. Somebody confides that I’m not the only South African visiting —another whole South African delegation has been in the building all day. (I, meanwhile, am not getting the all-day treatment; my pitch and the response, should I crack just half a nod, is a tightly pre -scheduled 30 minutes, 45 tops!) But, interestingly enough, it’s not some mega filmmaker or known film investor who’s come a courting but an African telecom company (which shall remain secret for now) which is in the building, looking to tie up availability of top-name US talent for content generation not yet imagined, conceptualised, or even scripted.

Spotted the gold

Back to Cannes, it turns out, it’s the telecom companies that everyone is courting as well — and looking to for dollars. There’s talk that Orange is ripe for tales of diversity, busy making a deal with Canal Plus. Meanwhile, France’s SFR is also leaping into the content fray and the big deal that’s gone down is Netflix partnering with several of India’s leading telecom carriers. Clearly, telecom companies have spotted the gold in those TV hills and, frankly, making money out of customer’s telephone calls must seem like small potatoes by comparison!

Meanwhile, talk of ‘content’ is rapidly falling by the wayside, perhaps because it’s too generic, has become so broad as to fail to effectively describe what its attempting to describe? Now it’s “original creation” that everyone’s looking for, an escalation of “content” away from TV’s “commercial” extension toward a more auteur-oriented, diversity-driven, narrative-strong “original creation” platform.

Being a commercials guy myself, I know the extent to which smart commercial thinking helps to set the stage for incoming narratives, which in this case could be the visualisation and escalation of stories of real diversity playing out in the short format, all helping to set the stage for bigger “original creation” projects. So I, for one, look forward to a continuation of the trend that we already see in advertising towards more-adventurous, less-homogeneous tales, or the ending of the scourge of ‘representative race’ casting. Performance and story — those ideas that touch the heart — are still the values we look for. Nobody loves that most-phony of segmented demographic TV representations (two black, one white, one coloured and an Indian person walk into a bar…)

A peculiar thing

I’m in Cannes on a couple of projects myself but the one that’s getting interest is a project I’ve had for around eight years. A peculiar thing has happened over the gestation of this project: When first we tried to raise interest, there was fascination with the story line (an immigrant tale set in SA) but reluctance to move forward precisely because it was ‘not familiar American narrative turf’. Now, however, we’re described as being ‘ahead of the curve’, suggesting perhaps that the TV business is moving in our direction — there’s some genuine interest, it seems, in what we can offer — diversity and, hopefully, authenticity.

The ‘fresh’ desire we discover in TV meetings is to see the creation and recognition of diversity and authenticity, and to create a sense of the presence of unique ‘diverse worlds’ in the lives of the audience. Joburg/Africa, in our case, is viewed as this kind of ‘ship at sea’ that no audience may or should disembark from once we’re on the journey — incredibly different characters thrown together, heroes of one’s own stories, villains of the stories of others intersecting with archetypal consequences in powerful and unavoidable battles, all of this set in lands both familiar and exotic and diverse.

With luck, we and other diverse content creators with fresh worlds to reveal may be part of a broader, growing trend if we can bake the cake right and avoid what New Orleans’ mayor Mitch Landrieu referred to recently as ‘marinading reality in historic denial’. His reference was to the American South’s long overdue debate on the removal of Confederate symbols, but for us, long-used to the SA marinade, his comments call to mind the cultural challenge of phenomena such as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.

Clear understanding

Along with the discussions of ‘diversity creation’, there’s a clear understanding from some players, though not all, that diversity is achieved not just by peppering white male talent with a few appropriate gender and race shadings. A deeper understanding of cultural appropriation and an appropriate response are called for as fresh tales of diversity are explored: There’s a particular cultural power dynamic in which members of dominant cultures continue to take elements from the culture of peoples they have systematically oppressed for centuries. This can no longer be the principal modus operandi and is certainly no longer — nor was it ever — acceptable; we need to find new ways to interpret our shared stories.

The question is: What may we do to work against cultural appropriation while, at the same time, encouraging the telling of our stories so that we, not the next US or British or European film crew that happens along, get to tell them? So far, its most-often been the other way around (at least as far as decently funded, filmic explorations of SA stories are concerned).

As filmmakers in features and commercials, we have to bend over backwards to be authentic. To challenge stereotypes. To call out appropriation when we see it, either on screen or preferably before it gets to screen. And we have to resist making the ‘other’ cultures invisible with that tired old ‘melting pot’ narrative. Nobody — and no culture — was born wanting to not be visible. Everyone wants to know oneself and be known for being oneself. Which is not always easy, but we all deserve the chance for ourselves, our families and communities to be seen.

“Relationship resembling reconciliation”

As James Baldwin says, “The barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of self is high. There are so many things we would rather not know! We cannot will away the forces that threaten our security. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wished it to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities into a relationship resembling reconciliation [emphasis added].”

Maybe that relationship of reconciliation with our own selves will be at the root of our unique South African story telling. As the bard says, “the times they are a-changin’” — and who’s to say that’s not for the better?

 

Ian Gabriel is director and co-founder of Giant Films. Raised in Hillbrow’s urban melting pot, he was a teacher, political organiser, writer and then theatre activist at downtown Joburg’s legendary Dorkay House before he settled on a career in film, partnering with producer and wife Cindy Gabriel to form Giant Films. Inspired by the craft of performance, Ian creates a safe world in front of camera for actors and crew where community is the key driving force.

“Motive” is a by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but generally don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup, unless the topic is off-column.

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