Word: filmed
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...apartheid, South Africa had no film industry to speak of. Filmmakers had either been co-opted by the white regime for propaganda or driven underground. Foreign filmmakers - whose big budgets can help prop up smaller local industries - had stayed away. With apartheid gone and sanctions lifted, that changed. Television commercial producers from around the globe discovered that Cape Town combined a spectacular location with skilled, cheap crews. Movie makers found that South Africa's diverse landscape - savannah to desert, winelands to white-sand beaches - could stand in for almost anywhere, while the people of the Rainbow Nation, with a carefully...
...Chweneyagae (the Oscar-winning Tsotsi) wouldn't either. It's just a little strange that South Africa's most important stories are so often told by foreigners. "Imagine how the Americans would feel if we cast a South African as Martin Luther King," says Johannesburg-based producer and film financier Paul Raleigh. "It's like the old Westerns, when the Indian chiefs were white guys in make-up. It's just wrong." (See pictures of South Africa in the election...
Raleigh is part of a new generation of South African filmmakers determined to take back the country's stories and invest them with a spirit that goes deeper than skin. He produced 2005's Tsotsi, a film about a township hoodlum who steals a car - and the rich black couple's baby in its back seat - which shattered once and for all the naive but, among outsiders, popular notion that all South Africa's stories can be framed in terms of black and white. Another is director Michael Raeburn, who has just released Triomf, a bleak examination of a poor...
...Goodbye Bafana (the friendship between Mandela and his white prison guard) with Joseph Fiennes in 2007. This year brings Endgame, a thriller about the secret talks to end apartheid starring William Hurt and Jonny Lee Miller. In February, as Ving Rhames was wrapping Master Harold . . .and the Boys - a film about the relationship between a white boy and his black servant - Damon and Freeman arrived for their rugby turn. (See pictures of the best Oscar dresses...
...Hollywood's obsession with South Africa hasn't carried over into the box office. Many of the U.S. films of the past few years have struggled to get a release. Those that have, flopped. Why? "Audiences like authenticity - something that's real and from the heart," says producer Raleigh. The truth is that no country is ever as simple as black and white, let alone one with South Africa's unrivalled ethnic mix and bloody history. When Tsotsi won its best foreign film Oscar in 2006, the cast and crew went to Mandela's house for a celebration. "After...