Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (2005)

At a time when many South Africans are leaving – or considering leaving the country – because of the terrible crime rate, one often forgets that many people from other countries actually want to live here. Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon is a timely reminder that while it is bad in South Africa right now, there are many places in the world where things are much much worse . . .

Review by : James O'Ehley

Finding Fatima . . . actor Tony Kgoroge hits
the Jo'burg streets

Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon is a difficult film to classify. It can at best be described as a “docudrama.” On the one hand there is the “-drama” bit, in which a fictitious moody writer named Keniloe (Tony Kgoroge) meets a Somalian refugee named Fatima in a Johannesburg park one – you guessed it – Sunday afternoon.

Then there is the “docu” element, in which Keniloe simply starts walking around the streets of Johannesburg talking to and interviewing the people he meets, mostly refugees and immigrants from other countries. As soon the movie confirms your Afropessimist suspicions – most of the immigrants are from countries such as Uganda, Kenya and Somalia who fled their native lands because of intermittent wars, political strife, discrimination against women, religious persecution and so forth – the movie shifts gears and he interviews some refugees from non-African countries: a family from the Gaza strip, a South Korean woman and a woman who fled the war in the erstwhile Yugoslavia.

It is then that one realises that the refugee problem is a global one and that our fictitious main character might as well have been wandering about the streets of London or Paris and would have come across a similar selection of displaced people (he would also have come across quite a number of white South Africans on the streets of London of course).

The cast of characters is fascinating and one wishes that the movie would spend more time on them instead of pursuing the “Finding Fatima” subplot. There is a French-speaking Congo national who served as a soldier for Mobotu Sese Seko's oppressive regime who survived a machete attack. Two Catholic women who fled Kenya because of their practice of female circumcision. The Ugandan youth whose entire family was killed in that country's dragging civil war.

(Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon ought to make for a great DVD because according to its director Khalo Matabane a lot of material ended up on the cutting floor and it would be fascinating to see some of the interviews in full. One interview with an American woman angry at Bush's policies in Iraq living in self-imposed exile in South Africa for instance never even made it to the final movie.)

As its title suggests there are some moments of pretentiousness to be found in Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon particularly in the framing fictitious storyline. However, before one's patience is worn thin by the film school-style pretentiousness of the opening scenes and bassist Carlo Mombelli's jarring soundtrack, Keniloe soon hits the Johannesburg streets in search of Fatima and the movie truly comes alive.

While it is easy for South Africans to blame their country's woes on faceless foreigners stealing our jobs or robbing our homes, that xenophobia becomes more difficult as director Khalo Matabane's film lends a human face to those immigrants imbuing them with the desires, fears and hopes we all share. Despite the director's assertion in an interview we had with him after the film's South African premiere, this is a humanistic and not intellectual film, one to which our audience responded to in a very real and basic way.

Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon may be practically plotless, but it makes for hypnotic viewing as it touches on issues such as identity, nationalism, globalisation, war – you name it. It is a topical film that should be seen by all South Africans and it's a pity that the film will probably be relegated to the arty Cinema Nouveau circuit: this is a film that deserves a wide release. Still, it is a brave and uncommercial piece of film-making and one supposes that one should be grateful that Ster-Kinekor for actually releasing it in the first place. (If only all South African films were this good.) Kudos for all involved.

See Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon when it opens on 20 October in South Africa .