Women In Motion Phumi Morare

Tjoo…so at school I was really good at math. A lot of my mentors, parents, and teachers, were trying to encourage me to do finance or accounting and that’s what I ended up doing. I ended up studying finance and accounting and I kind of like it. I liked learning about business and the economy and then I got this really awesome opportunity to go and work for an investment bank in London and I took it. And I genuinely enjoyed the first two years but after those two years I felt this kind of desire to do something that was meaningful to me. I could see people around me at the bank really passionate about what they were doing and I just was feeling half hearted about it. So I thought if I’m gonna work this hard it better be something that I love. So that took me back to how do I get into film and it took me 3 years of like networking in the industry, meeting people, taking short courses to kind of like find my place and way.I ended up leaving the corporate world and working for a South African producer who mentored me as well and then through that I went to film school.

Wow, what an interesting story. Which is kind of similar to mine as someone who has studied accounting after highschool and realizing halfway through that this is not what I wanted to do long term, It takes a lot of courage and a lot of convincing even for our families especially in South Africa where there isn’t a lot of people who look like us in the industry.

Oh Yes it does!

In recent times, there has been discourse about representation, how important has that been for you as a filmmaker?

I mean it’s critical, it’s a priority, it’s very very important to me. Just me as a Black African woman getting to see representations of myself on screen in ways that we don’t really expect or we haven’t really seen before. And the thing is that I grew up around a lot of women as well and sometimes I’m like I haven’t seen someone like my grandmother on tv or someone like my aunt and so it’s just there’s so much breadth that is yet to be explored about us on screen so I really really believe in that. Then also behind the camera- it’s super important because in order to get the representation on screen most of the time it’s going to be the person behind the camera helping to bring that authenticity, so that’s important. Also just having opportunities for people of colour and women behind the camera is also important.

Would you say your upbringing, being surrounded by women, Black women has shaped how you tell stories today?

Yeah definitely because something I’m really obsessed with is the Black female gaze. Like how do I incorporate my lens and the lens of the women who raised me into my storytelling and into my work and it’s a question I’m constantly asking myself and when I work with people I’m constantly challenging them to think from that lens as well so I think that’s the way it’s shaped me as a filmmaker. I also think deeply about whether the perspective of a scene I’m writing or shooting is very much from a Black woman’s perspective.

That is powerful and I think we see this perspective in your recent short film Lakutshon’ilanga. You tap into how you see the world through the lens of a Black woman. Take us back a little bit to its conception and what inspired it?

So it’s inspired by my mother and her brother because there was a similar incident that happened to them in real life in the 80s. My mother saw her brother get taken into a police van when he was just a teenager. She knew that if she didn’t do something she might never see him again. And my mom told me the story, she’s very much like me, she’s very calm, soft spoken, and so I couldn’t imagine someone like that unleashing this crazy person that would go and fight aparatheid police. That really really interested me and it made me think about how a lot of times as women we can be underestimated and people make us think we’re weak or they think we’re weak but we know we have the inner strength and it takes something like what happens in the film to unleash that inner power and so that what i was interested in and I was also interested in the journey of a woman suppressed by her society and is told by the men around her or the white people around her that she’s a nobody but then in the end she shows them she is somebody.

Do you think the essence of the story – resilience and strength of a Black woman is part of the reason why the film has taken on a life of its own and resonated with so many people?

You know I ask myself this a lot throughout the journey of this film and it seems like they were resonating with the idea that love can conquer evil,and the idea of the power of love to transcend oppression. I think that’s kind of what people were latching onto. It’s always so hard to tell when you’re the filmmaker, you never know how people will respond.

I think that’s the beauty of filmmaking or art in general. You could create something with your own perspective and the audience receives it and has their own interpretations.

Yeah and that’s really special that it just takes a life of its own.

Right! Cause now it’s an Academy award shortlisted film, NAACP Image awards winning film, and a BAFTA nominated film? When you look at all these accolades, what do they mean for you as a Black African woman and receiving them with this very personal story?

Firstly, most of the time I couldn’t believe it was happening. It just felt so out of this world and then secondly, it also was very encouraging because when I was making the film I was at an American school and they were asking whether I thought people would care about a film with subtitles,that is about an African woman in the 80s. But I cared and I hoped South Africans at least would care as well and so to see the way people ended up caring was just mind blowing and encouraging cause then I saw that the world really does resonate with our stories and they do have a platform internationally and that was encouraging.

When we watch films that took place during the apartheid regime, oftentime they centre the political leadaers or well known freedom fighters- how intentional was it for you to centre the ordinary South African person in this film?

It was very intentional because when I started writing the script to me I was writing the story of my mother’s courage. So that wasn’t meant to be focused on some big political figure, it was just a story of a woman’s courage and so a lot of the time when I would get notes that I should bring in a lot of the bigger things that were happening in that period I refused because then it would take away from focusing on this woman. I always wanted the political context to be the backdrop.

Speaking of the many voices that were in your ear about what to add and what to strip away from the story, how were you able to stay true to your vision seeing that you were a student in an American school trying to tell a story about a South African Black woman’s courage?

It was tough! But one of the things I did was make sure that some of my writing mentors were South Africans.I had two South African mentors, one was a Wits University professors and another was a producer I met during an NFVF programme I was in before I went to film school and so I gotta have that alternative perspective to what I was hearing back in America. Also making sure that I had a lot of women also giving input. For example there’s a scene in the film where one of the patient’s touches the main character Lerato inappropriately and most of the times men would say that it was an unnecessary scene and I should take it out and the women really resonated with that scene and it was an important scene to understand her position in this world and so a lot of men were missing that aspect. That was a really interesting way to see how important it is to have diverse representation on people who give notes on your work.

I think it also ties back to one of your passions you mentioned earlier which is the femine gaze in cinema.

Oh yes! Definitely.

I know you shot this film here in South Africa as a student who was studying in LA, tell me about the logistics and how you managed to make it happen?

It was hard! (laughs). I mean, firstly the thing that was hard was convincing my school that I should shoot at home because they actually prefer people to shoot within a 40km radius of the school, so that was the first hurdle. I had to go in front of the thesis committee so many times to convince them. The second thing was that it was hard to plan it across the world. So I think we started planning for it a year before we shot it. I would take time when I was going home for Christmas holidays and stayed extra long to meet producers locally and start to find ways to find crew and luckily my school had some kind of partnership with AFDA and they put me in touch with them as well and I had meetings with them. Then my producer joined for about a month here in South Africa and we also did a pre-pre-production before our actual shoot so a lot of our work we were able to do then. We were really helped by the faculty and students of AFDA and a company called stage5 films who mentored us and the executive producer and that’s how we got our start.

As someone who is passionate representation of the African identity in cinema and as you mentioned earlier as well, the femine gaze, has there been any change you’ve seen in the industry locally or Africa at large?

Yes definitely. The changes I have seen in my limited years in the industry is definitely an increase in interest in North America on the African continent. I mean the Woman King film is coming soon so there’s definitely a lot of interest in African stories as a whole so that’s exciting. I hope it leads to opportunities for the local talent as well. There’s also the streaming services and they have also created opportunities for creatives. It’s also created opportunities for our local broadcasters to up their game as well, so I think that the positive change helps creatives have more opportunities.

Now from your experience, talk us through the process of actually submitting, and being selected by the Academy, NAACP and BAFTA’s. What’s the criteria for each award and how can one actually submit their films and get picked?

So the way that it worked for me is that this ( Lakutshon’ilanga) was my thesis film for film school so the awards, it wasn’t like the main BAFTAs it was the student BAFTAs and it wasn’t the main Academy Awards initially , it was the Student academy awards. But then once you get into those categories, you start getting noticed. For example when we won the Student Academy Award, we got an email from NAACP asking us to submit to their awards. Then winning the Student Academy awards qualified us to the main academy awards.There’s also a list of festivals that you need to get into and win certain awards at those festivals before you qualify for the main academy awards. The student academy awards was one of the qualifying criteria to submit. And when they told us we qualified to submit we submitted and hoped for best because at the end of the day it’s now a student film competing with professional films and by God’s grace it was shortlisted among some of the incredible films.

I was rooting for Lakutshon’langa to get that Academy Award nomination! Watching the live broadcast of the nomination and all but for it to even get as far as being shortlisted was a statement on its own.

It was, it was such an honor and just mindblowing.

And I guess what I want to know from you now is what do you want people to take away from this film and any other film you’re gonna be making in the future ?

Wow, That’s a really good question! And it’s also a really hard one. uuhmm…I want people to be able to experience an aspect of themselves they haven’t seen on screen before in a way that feels like they are seen. I want people to feel seen, and I hope my work speaks to social issues even if I do something light hearted, i’ll always want to speak about social issues so I hope it gets people talking and thinking about social issues as well. I mean I hope over time the answer to this question becomes more refined (laughs).That’s what I think for now.

In five years time we will circle back to this question and hopefully you will be able to expand?

Yes, please.

Alright, so any upcoming projects we should look forward to?

Yes, so I just got into the Sundance fellowship called The Sundance Uprise Fellowship and it’s for my next project which will be my first feature film that I’m hoping to shoot next year. It’s a story set on the coast of South Africa about a father and a daughter. I’m really excited about that one so I’m currently developing it.

We’re looking forward to that but to wrap it up, do you have any motivational words for upcoming filmmakers?

For me the biggest thing I learnt is that it’s about perseverance, it’s about knocking on every door until someone says yes because the people who end up making it in the long term in the industry are the ones who have the stamina to keep fighting. So that’s what I’ve learnt about filmmaking. It’s really really hard but at the end of the day the experiences are completely worth it, completely worth the difficulties and the pain and the tears it takes to get your project made. Someone said something really beautifuL recently, he said “ filmmakers or storytellers have a spiritual purpose with the stories they tell and should remember the responsibility they have in that”

And we end the interview on that powerful note. I thank her for always being willing to give as this is not the first time we have had communication with her and her response speaks directly to what Behind Her Lens Visuals is trying to achieve “ Thank you. I believe in that, especially as young Black filmmakers, we’re all coming up together, we should all support each other, be community to each other” .