Interview: Tengers

Interview with Michael Rix, director of Tengers, by Olivia Humphreys.

Michael Rix must be relieved. Nine years in the making, his second feature film TENGERS finally enjoyed its world premiere at the Cambridge film Festival on Saturday. Billing itself as ‘a movie that tells it like it is in the new South Africa’, TENGERS is the story of Jo’burg resident Rob, whose luckless attempts to write the ‘great South African novel’ are interrupted by his falling in love and winning the lottery. A sharp and dark satire, TENGERS is making history not just as South Africa’s first clay-mation feature film but as a new departure in the country’s comic cinema scene.

As Rix pointed out when I spoke to him just before the premiere, TENGERS is exactly what’s been missing in South African film, which tends to veer between the earnestly political and escapist slapstick. TENGERS offers a unique antidote, combining mordant critique with a deep compassion.

Born in Jo’burg in 1974, Rix has lived half his life under apartheid and half in the new democratic South Africa. He told me he wanted to make a film that stopped looking at apartheid politics and started looking at the problems currently facing the ‘Rainbow Nation’: poverty, crime, violence. A graduate of the Pretoria Technikon Film and Television School, Rix aimed, he says, to make a film that feels more relevant and recognisable to his audience. His generation were ‘handed this situation’, and there has been something artificial, he believes, about the huge changes which apparently took place overnight. One issue that is conspicuous by its absence is racism; instead TENGERS looks at how people cope with living in one of the world’s most violent cities. In Gauteng province, home to the ‘tengers’ of the title, there are five thousand murders a year and at least twice as many rapes. In spite of these horrifying statistics, Rix further exaggerates the situation in Gauteng, even managing to squeeze laughs out of it, and saying that his aim is to show ‘where we’re headed more than where we are now’.

Rix originally chose clay as a medium because of time and money constraints, since it allowed him to work on the project in his own time without the expense of hiring actors; yet clay is one of the film’s greatest charms. Aside from giving TENGERS a very distinctive and original look, Rix points out how clay also gives him greater control over his characters’ expressions; as we know from ‘Wallace and Gromit’, the clay-mation medium is perfect for comic timing. In fact Rix achieves something closer to TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE than the output of Aardman Animations, but his script is sharper than both. Clay also gives the events on screen a certain distance from reality, making potentially painful home truths easier to confront. These are, after all, controversial issues in a sensitive, young country. So far, the reception has been positive, Rix tells me. He seems to have tapped into a love of black comedy. In fact, he says, the darker the humour, the bigger the laugh in a Gauteng audience. South Africa is indeed ‘a country in need of some light relief’, Rix claims, and there is definitely something cathartic about a film which allows people to laugh in the face of a disturbing daily reality.