Reactionary Reviews | FOSTA
DIFF | Premiere | SC7: 5pm July 24
FOSTA is a document of our times. As a film it often hedges its bets, reflexively providing quick solutions after touching on the real issues in play.
While ostensibly about DJ Fosta's redemption story, the film often feels like a tale of the triumphs of Bridges For Music, an organisation that has for many years been organising workshops in Langa with big-name EDM headliners featuring at South African music festivals.
Let me be clear here, Bridges For Music is a valuable organisation, the people involved locally and globally should be celebrated. However FOSTA the documentary makes a critical error by focusing on the visually and sonically uplifting moments to denote triumph, and relegates the actual challenges to voice-over and retrospective analysis.
Filmed over thirteen years, one particular interview with Fosta from 2013 indicates that a much better documentary lurks under the sheen. What the film doesn't convey is the complexity of Fosta pushing back at Bridges. An unintended result that helped Bridges achieve its intended effect.
It seems that while FOSTA the film reaches so often for the feelgood (often by snapping into branded content mode) it never really feels earned, while the struggles of Fosta the actual human surface only in glimpses.
The entire thrust of the film is not, as is mentioned in the publicity, DJ Fosta travelling from prison to Glastonbury, but rather Fosta realising that his calling was not making music for commercial gain or fame, but actually helping kids find music as a way of finding purpose. In this regard Fosta is the bridge between Bridges For Music and the community, which was something that the seasonal workshops could not do.
And yet the film gives scant space to the struggles that must have taken place for him to put his musical ambition down, to lobby community members, and to actually get Bridges For Music to commit to staying in Langa and building a school, rather than just popping in every summer. These negotiations are only hinted at. The entire building process takes up relatively little screen time.
Perfunctory story space is given to his relationship as a mentor to a young musician, Siphe Fassie (and an inordinate amount of time is spent explaining who Brenda Fassie was), without teasing out the daily mechanics of what that relationship must have been like in off-season months, without the festivals, the Richie Hawtins, and so on.
The school, from the footage, seems to be more than just an EDM lab, but to what extent it is a proper music school is left unexplored, even though the film previously foregrounded both Langa's and Fosta's deep jazz legacy.
FOSTA the film deservedly heaps celebration onto Fosta the man, but tends to relegate him to a product of Bridges, rather than a person who successfully negotiated within that ecosystem, while honouring that ecosystem beyond what it understood, and brought a larger purpose to his life and his community.
While it may be filled with missed opportunities, FOSTA is a beautifully realised film, a journey worthy of attention, filled with moments beyond mere feelgood, invoking actual tears.
Bonus Moments:
A white German musician in a faux ragga accent discovering that something is happening in Cape Town NOW, he can feel it. Like it only started happening when you got here, pal?
A guy riding a bike across Europe to raise money for the school, proclaiming: “If just one Quincy Jones comes out of that school, it will be worth it.” Missing the point entirely, but thanks for the euros.
And Skrillex trying to pronounce Gqom.