GAZI

Raphadu Maphoto - Director's Statement

For Africans (Azanians), our lives, our experiences and existence is the copyrighted sole property of a settler minority who have appointed themselves narrators of black of life. The film Gazi in its entirety protest the ideology and adds a voice of change in how we view African cinema.

We crafted Gazi to have the atmosphere of intense disquiet percolates through almost every frame. The edgy experimental film explores what African spirituality might look like today while addressing social issues that may comfort a black child. This fierce tension and accompanying sense of unease that I attempt to capture with often rhapsodic beauty, exists in spite of the long periods of meditative stillness, states of inertia and pause that beset the film.

The process of creating a new film language, enables me to express myself through a vernacular aesthetic also means I often refrain from making films for a European audience but to focus the efforts on healing my people through the medium. For my people to understand. Subversion of the mainstream is to look inwards, to speak my mother tongue, and to see the aesthetic through my mother's eyes. In the process, one must suspect, as we are being seduced by the film's drugged-out rhythm, somewhere between this physical realm and an ethereal alternative.

Or perhaps, like the stoic 22-year old protagonist Amanda who is called upon by her ancestors, occupies most of these frequently immobile frames, we are waiting for inspiration, a glimmer of hope, or perhaps a sign from the ancestors, some moment when heaven and Earth might align so that the light will vanquish the darkness.

The camera was meant to lure the audience in. It pans a vast mountainous terrain, dawdles across flower-dappled plains and valleys, savours the infinite blue of the vast sky above. Not to mention how the township was set-up as a canvas to picture the vibrant essence of black life, which is not so common in our time.

Furthermore, the intention of using African spirituality as a vehicle to solve our event narrative problem is to debunk the negative notions around African spirituality and its traditional practices. Awakening is not chagnginwho you are but discarding who you are not. Amanda is forced to not only try figure out what her deceased sister is communicating to her in the spiritual world but also has to face disgruntled community members who have the potential to endanger her. Two worlds collide, she is split in between.

Hence, the world of the story gives live to the characters. The living dynamic of the township needs to activate the world of the story. In this world, having a spiritual calling is proven to be beneficial as ancestors in the spiritual world use an individual to heal a community through herbs as they guide those who are misguided. The narrative needs to be explored in an experimental manner as it is the battle of two worlds, not knowing that they both depend on each other. An embrace of complexities in contemporary Africa as these are some of the challenges that people still face today.

The responsibility is our as writers and creatives from differnet walks of life to reflect times. Sometimes in film or television, we don't get to the depth of our stories because we put gloss over it and end up with unrealistic fantasies. So in this this instance we choose to confront and face the truth to better prepare the future. Gazi unpacks "The gift of seeing the unseen" and is a narrative that I hope the audience with any background will watch with a careful eye and enjoy.