Fokofpolisiekar: Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do, Bryan Little’s feature length documentary about the cult Afrikaans rockers, will be released on 23 October 2009, after being pushed from its original 4 September release. The Fly on the Wall project received the highest votes overall at Encounters, where it won Best South African Documentary.

Director Bryan Little says the idea for the film came from attending the first Fokofpolisiekar show in Cape Town. “We just watched the reaction on people’s faces to this band, and the film was started on this tiny premise of trying to understand why people responded the way they did.”

They approached guitarist Wynand Myburgh with the idea of the documentary in 2006, not knowing that the band had decided to take a break for a while just a couple of weeks earlier. “It was strange to realise that we would have to tell it as a retrospective.” Luckily, the band has reunited regularly since then, which made shooting live footage possible.

DOP Grant Appleton shot on multiple formats, from 16mm to home video to HD. Bryan says shooting the shows was particularly challenging. “He was reloading film cameras and shooting 16mm in the dark, half drunk on stage, when everyone’s going crazy – you’ve seen what it’s like at a Fokof show. It’s a difficult thing to become part of a scene like that without intruding, because if you shove a camera in someone’s face it changes everything. But Apples was incredible.”

From the initial story of how the band was affecting their fans, additional layers were added. “It’s also the story of five young guys growing up, and there’s also the story of the context that it all comes from. South Africa is such a complex society, which I think so many of us are hesitant to dig into. I know as a filmmaker I didn’t want to speak about Apartheid and how I felt growing up at the end of it, as it felt like so much had already been said about it, but I think it’s important that we continue to talk about this transition.”

One of the strengths of the film was Bryan’s decision to use a communal narrator, which gives the story a more complex feel. “Early on, I made a decision to not have a narrator in the film. It was a difficult decision to make, as you then don’t have someone who can explain how you feel and it ties your hands. But it was really important that this story was told by the people involved in it.”

They initially thought the self funded project would take a few months, but the world premiere at Encounters was two-and-a-half years later. “You could carry on forever, so we decided there had to be a cut off. Liam Lynch’s exhibition felt like a looking back and a natural time to start resolving everything. In the end, we must have had 350 hours of footage.

Initially I was going to cut it, but luckily we found Wim Steytler, because I was never going to be able to do it – it wouldn’t have had the same class. Wim locked himself away with the footage, but our first edit was still eight hours.”

After its release, Fokofpolisiekar will screen at the Sundance Film Festival and the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) at the start of next year.

Watch the trailer here and comment on this story.

Kevin Kriedemann