As the Love Ulster debacle raged outside the screening of U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha at the recent Jameson International Film Festival, feelings in the cinema ran even higher. Enraptured by this thrilling street-based film production of Bizet’s opera, by the time U-Carmen’s star and co-writer Pauline Malefane arrived in person, the audience threatened to carry her off on their shoulders to make her their new goddess.

It’s just that kind of movie.
Okay, writer’s admission – the only opera I’ve ever made it through is What’s Opera, Doc? with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd slugging it out to the strains of Wagner. I did not expect to sit grinning idiotically throughout a South African production of an opera-comique from 1874. I certainly didn’t bank on the overwhelming urge to cartwheel afterwards. Though buffs have raved, with The Observer declaring it the standard by which all Bizet productions must now be measured, U-Carmen’s greatest achievement has to be winning over dolts like me.
Indeed, since nabbing the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival last year, U-Carmen has knocked out like-minded philistines all over the planet.
Sitting with the impossibly jolly Pauline Malefane some hours after the Irish premiere threatened to become a loved up Nuremberg, she’s more than tolerant of my vast ignorance.
“The first opera I saw was Don Giovanni on a school trip”, she recalls. “I remember the costumes and people singing at the top of lungs to each other rather than speaking to each other. Oh God. They were singing in a language I didn’t know. I was still at high school so my English was poor and I couldn’t even read the subtitles. I just couldn’t keep up with it. I forgot about opera for seven years after that.”
Nobody was more surprised than she when she became South Africa’s pre-eminent soprano.
“I always knew I could sing,” she tells me. “I was involved in school choirs from early on. But growing up in the township, you might think about being a nurse or a teacher, but not a singer. Then I heard about a choral training program with Cape Town Opera and I auditioned to study for a year. It was quite rough. All the students knew what they were talking about and I was slowest in the class. But by the end of the year listening to Maria Callas inspired something in me. Still, my parents were very confused even after they saw me sing. South Africa is a very rich place with many stories set to song, but opera has not historically been part of our culture at all.”
Happily, the brilliant Cape Town lyric theatre company Dimpho Di Kopane have done sterling evangelical work for the cause. DDK is an opera collective founded by British directors Charles Hazlewood and Mark Dornford-May (Pauline’s husband and U-Carmen’s director). Uniquely, they recruit performers from auditions held in rural South Africa and townships. Run as a collective, U-Carmen saw Pauline writing, starring and making the tea on location.
“The aim is to bring black people into the entertainment business,” she says. “Like you see in the film in the township the only way to amuse ourselves or keep happy is to go get drunk or get into a fights. This shows another way to entertain ourselves and the success of the film will hopefully inspire other actors and artists to come out. We have to look after ourselves. The opportunities are not there. You can’t run a business if you don’t go to school. We need to empower the black community in terms of opportunity. We can’t depend on Nelson Mandela now. In terms of cinema that means finding our own audience.”
Much of U-Carmen’s vibrancy derives from this culture clash between the high European classical form and life in the townships. Sung and spoken in Xhosa, one of South Africa’s eleven official languages, the film was shot, documentary style, on the bustling streets of Khayelitsha, Pauline’s birthplace and home to half a million people.
“There were four of us working on the French translation,” explains Pauline. “It takes time because the words have to fit the music. Then Rory Bremner translated it into English and we worked that back into Xhosa so we could keep all his humour. The funny things are mostly his.”
Bizet’s tale of sexual jealousy finds surprisingly easy accommodation with the gangsters and shebeens of the shantytown. In Mr. Dornford-May’s breathtaking production the bullfights become witchdoctor ceremonies and Carmen is not so much a doomed siren as a badass.
“I love the character,” gushes Pauline. “I love that she is independent and out for fun. People may say she is a bitch but I don’t think so. She is trying to live in a world that is so male dominated. And if you are fighting with men you have to fight with everything you have. It is wise to let men think they are the head of the house and that they are making decisions. But men are the heads and women are the necks. So whatever the neck does the head must follow.”
DDK will follow U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha with Son Of Man, their interpretation of the New Testament. Pauline will play Mary, the mother of Jesus. One suspects she won’t get up to nearly as much mischief.