Index

1.   Introduction
2.   Childhood
3.   Formal education
4.   Experience in the film industry
5.   Working with Jamie Uys
6.   Establishing a 35mm cinema
7.   Abandoned Master's Diploma
8.   Restoration of A Fire in Africa
9.   The magic bullet
10.  Conclusion

Gerhard Uys is an independent filmmaker based in Pretoria, South Africa. In 1977, when Gerhard was studying filmmaking at the Pretoria Technikon Film School, his first-year film, featuring now well-known actress Brümilda van Rensburg, won the award for best drama. Gerhard's extensive career covers a wide range of genres, with some titles listed on IMDb and the British Film Institute's database. He has recently restored and revisioned his feature film A Fire in Africa for distribution in cinemas and on TV.

Gerhard Uys grew up in Cookhouse, a small town - a railway junction, in fact - in the Eastern Cape, where his father, Pikkie, opened a filling station and restaurant next to the national road.

When Gerhard was five, his father took him to the South African Railways and Harbours cinema, the only entertainment in town, where he saw his first movie. Gerhard can still recall parts of the documentary on the building of a dam that he saw, as well as the conversation afterwards with his father: the movie made an indelible impression on him.

Gerhard became friends with the projectionist, who would give him pieces of 35mm film that were discarded when films broke and had to be spliced together again. Having seen the basics of how a Bauer cinema projector worked, with its reflector, arclight and lenses, Gerhard set about building his own projector. After several experiments this twelve-year-old managed to construct a fully functional slide projector on which he could view the film clips he had been given. The projected image was 4 x 3 metres and could be focused precisely.

Gerhard's father's businesses had a substantial impact on the Cookhouse economy. In his book Treine en Appelkose, Willem P. van Aardt recounts the trials and tribulations of Pikkie's Subway Service Station & Snack Bar, which, together with his farm, put him under enormous stress. Pikkie died of a heart attack at 47 when Gerhard was only 11 years old. This left his mother to raise him and his three sisters alone, and at the same time run two businesses and a farm.
 

Gerhard had just one aim after matriculating, and that was to work in the film industry. His mother was far from keen, imagining him as no more than wedding photographer, and to her that was not a proper career. But she agreed to his wish, on condition that he first studied teaching so that he could have "something to fall back on" should "wedding photography" fail to earn him a living. Gerhard agreed, and found himself enjoying academic life so much that he became a student for life.

Gerhard's substantial academic career began with a diploma from the University of Stellenbosch in the teaching of intellectually disabled pupils, and ultimately covered seven post-matric qualifications in total, the equivalent of 21 years of full-time study. Gerhard's academic qualifications include two teaching diplomas, a BA degree in communication and master's and doctoral degrees in motion picture production.

In 1977, after teaching for two years, Gerhard enrolled to study film production at the Pretoria College for Advanced Technical Education, the only institution in South Africa with a film school.

When he had graduated, he was employed as a film editor at the SABC, where he worked on more than a hundred programmes, including two documentaries that won Artes Awards, as well as a 13-episode drama series, Sebastiaan Senior, for film director Manie van Rensburg, then an emerging talent. Van Rensburg became Gerhard's movie-making mentor.

When he saw Gerhard's work on SABC TV, the managing director of Toron International, Edgar Bold, offered him a position as film editor to edit corporate documentaries for the Anglo American mining company. A year later, at the age of 28, he was offered a position as lecturer in film editing at his alma mater, the Pretoria Technikon Film School.

In 1983, while still a lecturer, Gerhard started his own company, Nickelodeon Films, which mostly edited feature films, some for distribution in Europe and the USA, and produced commercials and actuality programmes for the SABC and educational videos for Telkom, Armscor and the University of Pretoria. Gerhard also produced a TV programme for the French Chambers of Commerce, which covered French President Jacques Chirac's inauguration of F'SATI (the French South African Institute of Technology).

At Nickelodeon Gerhard wrote a screenplay, Skeleton Coast, which he sent to Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, because of the script's connection with nature conservation, Charles' life-long passion. The Prince's agents told Gerhard that, because they were not involved in feature film production, they could not be part of the project. But a few months later they approached Gerhard to write a documentary script, Plight of the African Elephant. Sadly he could not accept the offer, due to commitments to training programmes for UNESCO.

Gerhard wrote several screenplays, one of which, Frankie's Flyer, was sold to Grundy TV in Australia and the SABC. Julian Friedmann (a literary agent in London), M-Net and Peak Viewing all responded positively. M-Net's assessor wrote: "Based on fact, this local story is quaint and highly entertaining. It is a nicely worked screenplay which can hardly be faulted." Peak Viewing's script assessor was also impressed when he reported: "It's a fascinating story - true life? Good Lord. Wonderful story in fact."

Selling the screenplay to two TV stations raised hopes that it might one day become a movie - meaning that Gerhard would be involved in producing a meaningful art movie. Sadly, Murphy - he whose law states that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" - also seems to be behind system buy-outs, distribution policy changes and more, with the result that the screenplay was never turned into a motion picture. The principle that "he who controls the distribution, controls the industry" prevailed, despite the fact that it is artists, not business people, who create the greatest motion pictures.

Once ignited in 1957, Gerhard's passion for movies never wavered. At the age of twelve, he "produced" his first home movie, Monster, shot on 8mm with a Kodak camera that he still has today. During this time Gerhard wrote to the great South African comedy film director Jamie Uys asking whether he could come and work for him one day.

Years later, Jamie told Gerhard that he could not recall ever receiving the letter: perhaps it was swept away in the flood of letters he was receiving at the time. Jamie expressed his disappointment, because he believed that filmmakers with the true passion required to make a good movie were few and far between.

Jamie then made up for the mistake by giving Gerhard a small role in his movie Funny People 2. Gerhard plays the part of a man who gets thrown out of a restaurant by two bouncers after complaining to the waitress about his coffee being cold.

When Gerhard became head of the Pretoria Technikon Film School, he appointed Jamie as the school's guardian, so that he could share his knowledge of filmmaking with the students. Jamie made an invaluable contribution to their understanding of the film medium, despite some filmmakers ironically referring to his unorthodox way of working as "Jamie's Circus". Jamie made an enduring impression on the few who understood his genius. His passion and unparalleled understanding of comedy filmmaking made him the most successful South African film director of all time. Jamie remained guardian until his death in 1996, at the age of 74.

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In 1984, Gerhard was approached by the film school's students for permission to use one of the lecture halls as a cinema to show movies to the public. They wanted to raise money to pay for their student movies, which were becoming expensive to produce. Gerhard's view was that, with Ster-Kinekor just around the corner showing the latest movies, the students' chances of making money were slim. He proposed an alternative, namely, working with Ster-Kinekor.

Gerhard knew that the 600-seat Transvalia Cinema (now defunct) had been making a loss for years, and decided that hiring the cinema for a film festival in August, a few months before the students had to produce their short pieces, might just work. Ster-Kinekor agreed and so the Pretoria Film Festival, with its logo of the man with the camera head on its posters, was established. In its first year the festival grossed R15 000, growing to R93 000 seven years later, as the running of the festival improved.

When the film school moved to the technikon's new main campus, Gerhard decided that the festival was making enough money to justify its own cinema there. In 1991 a fully professional cinema was established with a Bauer projector- the kind that Gerhard had got to know so well 34 years before - complete with the best possible sound system, an electronically operated curtain ... the works! The film school was the only one in Africa with facilities to train students in managing a professional cinema.

Sadly, a year later, a dean from another faculty objected because the film school, with only around 50 students, was allowed to occupy an auditorium that could seat 160 students. The cinema was shut down and the screen and curtains dumped in a corner of the technikon grounds where, exposed to the elements, they rotted away. 

While head of the Film School, Gerhard enrolled for his Master's Diploma in Film Production, for which he was required to produce a feature film. Gerhard approached his colleague Emil Kolbe, who was lecturing scriptwriting, and together they developed the original screenplay for A Fire in Africa. The master's research project set out to provide a comprehensive guide for The Production of Low-budget Feature Films in South Africa (from Concept to Distribution), as part of the South African B-Film Subsidy Scheme, with its focus on producing films for black African audiences. This research, together with the B-Scheme itself, was an ideal opportunity for young filmmakers to gain valuable knowledge before starting their careers in feature film production.

Two years later, the film was completed and exhibition copies made for distribution. However, in 1990, when the study, with a thesis exceeding 400 pages - the most comprehensive in the history of the Pretoria Technikon Film School - was in its final stages, the B-Scheme was terminated, which rendered the research virtually obsolete. But, even though the research had to be abandoned, the film was completed and sold to the SABC's TV2 and TV3 channels. It was also screened at the Mail & Guardian Film Festival and in township cinemas and schools across Gauteng until it eventually qualified for full state subsidy.

For many years Gerhard kept himself occupied with the full spectrum of film production, from producing commercials for distribution in Ster-Kinekor cinemas to being part-time supervising editor for Cannon Films. After 33 years of struggling to collaborate in the production of a feature film that reflected artistry rather than commercialism, Uys retired and accepted things the way they were - until an unexpected opportunity from the past arose.

For a comprehensive account of the five-year restoration and revisioning of A Fire in Africa from 2017 to 2021, with all its trials and tribulations, see the media release on this website. Here we offer a short outline of the process.

A Fire in Africa lay unwatched for 33 years, until the family of Sensei Albert Brelage, who played the American karate team captain, contacted Nickelodeon to request a VHS copy of the film, which he had never seen, to present to him on his 80th birthday. But no watchable copy existed, apart from the SABC versions dubbed into isiZulu and Sesotho, so it was decided to use the negative stored at the National Film, Video and Sound Archives to produce a good-quality digital copy of the film.

Laura van der Merwe and Mark Buyskes, at the time lecturers at AFDA, needed a production for the practical component of their master's degrees, so they asked Nickelodeon to make A Fire in Africa available. In return, Nickelodeon would receive a partially restored version, called the "academic version". This was agreed to and on 24 November 2017 the academic version of the film premiered at Ster-Kinekor Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank, during AFDA's annual awards and assessment evening, and Laura and Mark obtained their master's degrees. The screening of the movie on the big screen with high-quality digital sound was quite impressive and made Gerhard believe that the movie had the potential to be restored for distribution on the professional cinema and TV circuit. This assumption led to the creation of a fully restored director's version, which had to be of sufficient quality to make professional distribution possible

When someone sets out to produce a feature film, they never know exactly what the outcome will be. This uncertainty often ends up with the dreaded decision to "pull the plug" in the middle of production, a prospect faced twice by A Fire in Africa. The key problem was the limited budget, which made it impossible to hire professional post-production facilities to create the polished look and feel that potential film and TV distributors would certainly require. The decision to proceed and invest considerably more money in the restoration and revisioning came about when M-Net and Indigenous Film Distribution saw the trailers for A Fire in Africa on the movie's website and requested a copy of the completed production to preview for possible distribution. Licensing (selling the right to screen) the movie had become a real possibility even though no distribution deal was in place - a very perilous situation that all film producers warn against.

The restoration of the film, which mostly involved editing, took five years to complete. Production of the original version had taken just two years! Because the original production had run out of money, it had no definitive ending, so an ending had to be filmed now - and had to match what had been filmed 33 years earlier.

Ironically, the outbreak of Covid-19 during the restoration period gave Gerhard and Neels more editing and refining time than is normally the case. According to Gerhard, these extra two years undoubtedly gave the movie the extraordinary level of technical refinement and artistic power that it has ultimately achieved.

Editing, Gerhard believes, means directing the film for the second time, and is an often-neglected part of the production process. Gerhard also believes that viewers who pay to see a movie deserve experiential value - in other words, they are entitled to be entertained, not bored. During the five years of restoration, no effort was spared to increase the artistic quality as much as possible. The video Directing Techniques on the website provides a glimpse of the effort that went into the restoration process.

Gerhard Uys was the first South African to obtain a doctorate in motion picture production. A Fire in Africa, his first and only feature film, may not become a blockbuster, but is certainly remarkable considering the original version's low budget and the inexperience of a crew consisting mainly of students.

On the other hand, 99% of the stories from Hollywood - with unlimited budgets, the best casts and crews in the world, the slickest marketing campaigns and the most lucrative distribution deals - are meaningless, according to Jack Grapes, an award-winning Los Angeles scriptwriter. This is because, he says, they don't have emotional truth: that deep voice that ensures that the story is compelling for the audience.

Gerhard likes quoting the great director David Lean, who once said that when he assessed a scene being filmed, he would always ask himself one question: "Is it true?" This belief echoes Grapes' "emotional truth", but how is that achieved?

In 2004, when Gerhard's emotional intelligence (EQ) was tested by the Tshwane University of Technology, he was found to have the highest EQ of all academic staff ever tested at the university. Taking into consideration that EQ is defined as "the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions", and that emotion is central to our experience in creating any work of art, the answer to that question may well lie in emotional intelligence.

The strongest argument in favour of this low-budget indie film A Fire in Africa is the number of times it has prevailed against the odds, justifying its second lease on life in its new digital format.

The four most striking aspects of this film are that:

1. It is the first full-length student feature film produced in South Africa that was sold to two TV channels.

2. It is, according to our research, the lowest-budget feature film ever to have been produced by any country in a foreign country.

3. Apart from having, as Malcolm Gooding puts it, "a nice African feel", the film also has a deeper philosophical level and, thanks to the dynamic stills techniques, a unique finesse.

4. The filming of a storyline with a break of 33 years was resumed after an actual break of 33 years, so that the two principal actors, Japan Mthembu and Rod Alexander, were, in fact, 33 years older and consequently required no ageing make-up or prosthetics. This is a first in the history of filmmaking.

In the final analysis, the treatment of the subject matter is skilfully integrated with the enigmatic story statement, and the subject matter is further enriched by a diversity of cinematic techniques, all of which align to create a visceral and unforgettable experience. This newly restored and upgraded digital version of A Fire in Africa will, without doubt, earn respect and praise from film students, critics and connoisseurs.

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