(Janet van Eeden)
A film produced and written by Durban filmmaker and AFDA
Durban Scriptwriting Lecturer, Janet van Eeden, A Shot at the Big Time, the short, has been selected for the Cannes
Court Metrage, the short film corner of the official Cannes Festival 2014. It
was chosen out of over a million entries.
“This honour is something my co-producer, Magda M Olchawska,
and I have dreamed of since we joined forces to make A Shot at the Big Time, the short,” says Van Eeden. “We met online
when I ran the Indiegogo.com crowd-funding campaign in 2011. I’d given up on
the dream recently and am working hard at present raising funds to make the
feature film by the end of the year, so when Magda let me know late on Thursday
night that we’d been accepted, I was over the moon.”
Van Eeden launched the crowd-funding campaign for Shot on 11th of the 11th 2011, on
Remembrance Day, in remembrance of her brother, Jimmy, who was killed on the
border in mysterious circumstances after being there for only three days in
1979.
“I’d never been able to forget Jimmy’s tragic life, and
after being challenged by film and theatre critic, Robert Greig, to write about
my own life instead of writing plays about literary greats, I finally had the
courage to put pen to paper and tackle one of the saddest experiences of my
life,” she explains.
“Jimmy was my idol in the small town of Odendaalsrus. He was
a rock star in the eyes of all the youngsters as he was the lead singer in a
band which dreamed of making the big time. When he received his call-up papers
when he was only 17, his dream was put on hold. Especially after he had a
traumatic incident in basics which made him go AWOL, steal a rifle and fire
rounds of bullets into the rubbish dump with the members of his band. A
terrible accident happened and Jimmy had a breakdown and was classified as
mentally unfit for military service.
“He tried to put his life back together again but he was
broken by the events,” adds van Eeden. “Three years later the army forgot about
the fact that they’d classified him as unfit and called him up to do Border
duty. He was part of the infantry but he did not want to kill anyone. There are
conflicting stories of what happened to him on the border on that fateful day,
but all we know for sure is that three days after arriving on the border, my
parents received a phone call telling them that Jimmy had been killed by a
ricochet bullet.”
The feature film script of A Shot at the Big Time is based on the the story of the tragic loss
of Van Eeden’s brother which she says is Oedipal in its intensity. When she
couldn’t get funding for the feature without giving away the rights to the film
completely, and thereby compromising on the integrity of the story, she decided
to do a crowd-funding campaign after listening to US expert Peter Broderick at
the Durban Film Mart in 2011.
She decided to
produce the film herself. She didn’t raise enough money for the feature on
Indiegogo.com but received so much support, including finding gifted young
director from Australia, Stephen de Villiers and London producer Magda M
Olchawska, that they decided to shoot the short film instead. The lead actors
auditioned online as part of the crowd-funding campaign and “the best actors I
could’ve dreamt of” were found in Brad Backhouse as Jimmy and Sean C Michael as
the antagonist Van Staden. De Villiers flew out in July 2012 to film Shot the Short. Even an executive
Producer, Athol Williams, was found through the campaign and he gave whatever
he could to make the short film happen.
A Shot at the Big Time
was one of the projects selected for the Durban FilmMart in 2012 and the short
film premiered at the Durban International Film Festival in July 2013. It was
awarded an eThekwini Film Award in November 2013.
Producer, Magda M. Olchawska will represent A Shot at the Big Time at Cannes, as
there has not been enough time to raise sponsorship for Van Eeden’s visit.
However, she hopes the whole team will represent Shot next year when they enter the feature into the festival.
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