How Joburg Underground is bringing bold indie films to South African audiences

Joburg Underground is an organisation that curates independent film screenings, including the Joburg Underground Film Festival.

Its emergence has been a breath of fresh air in South Africa, where independent cinema remains frustratingly difficult to access and appreciate. The festival, in particular, provides a much-needed platform for avant-garde, micro-budget and otherwise overlooked films that many South African audiences might not have encountered before.

In late January, it screened The People’s Joker, a 2022 indie film from the US that proves to be both purposeful and strikingly sharp in its execution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M00AB03S_4

The People’s Joker is a comedic parody of a superhero movie, but director and co-writer Vera Drew uses it to convey a very personal story. Drew plays the main character, in what appears to be an autobiographical one-woman show, fleshed out with gleeful comic book fan fiction and whiz-bang homemade effects.

She traces the main character’s path in navigating her gender identity, from childhood to young adulthood, where she eventually learns to articulate that she is a trans woman. 

Her main single aspiration is to be a successful comedian on the state-sanctioned comedy programme UCB Live (clearly modelled on the American sketch comedy show SNL).

It’s set in an apparently dystopian Gotham City, but the elements that make it dystopian are indistinguishable from what we see in real life today: conspicuous government surveillance of unconsenting citizens, corporate suppression of free speech, and meaningless content designed to distract viewers from holding the powerful accountable.

In this world, performing comedy outside of UCB Live is illegal and punishable by death, and all approved comedians are either Jokers (the men) or Harlequins (the women). Drew’s main character defies the law by starting her own comedy club, and by creating the original comedy persona of “Joker the Harlequin”.

Her defiance eventually brings her into direct confrontation with Gotham’s shady caped crusader, Batman, who turns out to be a fascistic presidential hopeful, a billionaire warlord, and a closeted gay groomer. Her professional striving turns into an all-out superhero battle, with Gotham’s freedoms in the balance.

The People’s Joker is a micro-budget independent production, and Drew crowdsourced both the funding for the film and a lot of the artwork.

The resulting rough-and-tumble assemblage of art styles brings delight not only as a delectable visual treat, but as a thrilling view of the uninhibited possibilities of homemade/DIY filmmaking. Not slapdash home videos, but an entire superhero movie made on the fly by artists of limited means but discerning and refined sensibilities. You can make a DC movie too, if you want to, and it can be a great joy to those who see it.

Above all, what comes across in Drew and the other artists’ joyous work on this Joker spinoff is a great affection for the comic book heritage that they draw from. The movie is chock-a-block with references from the original Batman comics, the TV shows and the various movie iterations. 

Drew appears to have a particular disdain for the 2019 and 2024 Joaquin Phoenix-led Joker movies, but draws them into the fray nevertheless.

Screenings like The People’s Joker are especially valuable, for broadening and enriching the city’s artscape, where corporate mainstream media (local and international) still hold a stifling grip.

Inspired art from cinema’s grassroots has great power to inspire more artists in turn, and the more that emerges from the margins of culture, the richer we become. DM

More information about Joburg Underground and its events can be found on their Instagram page @jhb_under. Don’t miss the next screening on 28 February 2025.