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168 Charles Burnett’s Namibia Premieres at the 2007 LAFF Diane Sippl/2007 From Cinema Without Borders (www.cinemawithoutborders.com), July 4, 2007. Reprinted by permission. Lauded as one of America’s most gifted filmmakers, Charles Burnett has just completed his largest film ever, Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation. While earning his MFA in filmmaking at UCLA, Burnett made the now classic Killer of Sheep, and on that basis he was awarded the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the “genius grant”) with others to follow from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the J. P. Getty Foundation. He is also the winner of the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award and Howard University’s Paul Robeson Award for achievement in cinema. To Sleep with Anger won the 1991 Independent Spirit Award for Best Director and Best Screenplay for Burnett and Best Actor for Danny Glover, and the Library of Congress has entered it along with Killer of Sheep in the National Film Registry. Among his numerous films since then, Burnett has written and directed Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, a splendidly mind-boggling work about history as interpretation, and also Warming by the Devil’s Fire, a sensual, quasi-autobiographical tale of an L.A. boy getting religion and the blues in the same visit back home to Mississippi. A starkly different venture nearly three hours long, Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation is an epic that spans sixty years of history with 150 speaking roles in multiple languages and dialects, dramatizing Namibia ’s fight for liberation from South African occupation that culminated in Namibia’s independence in 1990. The cast includes Carl Lumbly and Danny Glover as well as local African actors, and the crew used diane sippl / 2007 169 former soldiers from both Namibia and South Africa who had fought against each other. I interviewed Charles Burnett in Westwood just following the film’s world premiere at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival. Diane Sippl: Can you explain the genesis of the project? Charles Burnett: It started with the government’s formation of PACON , the Pan-African Centre of Namibia, and their mandate was to do stories and themes in art works that dealt with Pan-Africanism. At the same time Sam Nujoma, the first president of Namibia and the former president of SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization), had just finished his autobiography called Nujoma: Where Others Wavered. Uazuva Kaumbi, the executive producer of the film, Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation, was on the board of PACON and suggested that they make a movie from the book. They hired a Namibian first-time writer for the first screenplay and brought in a Nigerian to do a polish. Then they took the script around looking for a director—Raul Peck was one—and they were looking for actors at the same time, believe it or not. They finally came around to me, and I read the script and thought it was feasible. When I was going to school I was aware of SWAPO, so I was very excited about doing it. But the script had limitations; it was more or less a TV movie. It didn’t cover the whole movement of SWAPO. It was just based on the book and needed to be expanded. It was all about Nujoma and they wanted it to be more about the people of Namibia. So we expanded it into an epic story of the human struggle of people wanting to get out from under the yoke of colonialism and free of South Africa’s apartheid system. The producers were supposed to find matching funds to support the production, but they never managed to do this, so the Film Commission , which is sponsored by the government, ended up financing the whole film. This cost about $10 million. Diane: How did you research the rest of the fighters and the military operations? Charles: I used the book only chronologically and for details about Nujoma’s family that he knew a lot about. But historically, I wanted to find the real facts and not rely on his perspective. So I read a lot of books, and Isaac !karuchab, who was a member of one of the military arms of SWAPO, a PLAN (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia) fighter, gave me a lot of information about the war, the battles, the songs they [3.144.35.148] Project MUSE...

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