The magic of money

Many years ago, a psychic told me that I would not struggle with money in this lifetime. There would be other, far more exacting struggles for my soul to contend with. Apparently, I had dealt with the energy and spirit of money in a past life. This was no unsolicited telling of my fortune — I had gone to seek some kind of guidance during the doubt-ridden second year of making my first film, Milisuthando, a feature-length documentary that recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival after almost nine years in the making.

I’d be lying if I said that, in the process of making the film, I didn’t pray, consult indigenous healers and clairvoyants, do rituals, and very much lean into a cosmic faith not only from a creative-direction perspective but also when it came to money. Of course, nothing was left only to chance. For many years, my producer and I wrote grant application after grant application, proposal after proposal, travelled overseas to pitch our film, pitched on Zoom through the pandemic — efforts that would yield anything from US$5 000 to US$80 000 in grants. But because money has its own language, I’ve had to learn to understand, attract, and make use of it in a way that doesn’t feel morally complicated, dirty, extractive, greedy, or guilt ridden.

Embarking on the pilgrimage of the past nine years with the mental security — whether real or not — that I don’t have to worry about money in this lifetime has been helpful in terms of accepting and facilitating the true ambitions of my artistic practice in a discipline that is the most exclusive, expensive, and collaborative of the arts. Our budget was high for a South African documentary. But, working with an international team, we were constantly told that, if we were going to make the film we wanted to make, we needed to increase our budget.

One of the greatest psychic afflictions of being colonised and then racially subjugated through systems such as apartheid is the poverty consciousness that sears itself into one’s being and quietly runs at the back of one’s mind like a TV programme on mute, determining how much one can stretch one’s imagination. This affliction isn’t necessarily placated by the presence of money where there was none, nor is it overcome by the ability to sustain one’s life financially.

I think the “science” of it comes down to one’s beliefs about money and the self. This cuts across race all the way down to how a person embodies their class position, which in this country are two sides of one coin.

I come from a middle-class Xhosa family from 1980s Transkei. Growing up, my father had a black book in which he did his budgeting. It was fastidiously filled with the curly numbers of his distinctive hand. He was responsible with money and we had everything we needed. For whatever else we wanted (sneakers, label jeans, pizza), the rule was that you got a job at 16 or stayed deprived.

I worked at McDonald’s. My older sister worked at Spur and my younger sister at Debonairs Pizza. How did this needs-are-met, wants-are-frivolous attitude shape my relationship with money? I can meet my financial needs, but I struggle to live inside a mentality of abundance where comforts don’t feel like indulgences.

One of the greatest challenges in the filmmaking process was stretching our financial imaginations to meet the demands of the film’s ideas and the global standards we encountered once we got funding. This came with being paid decent salaries; not treating the film as a side hustle to our main salaried jobs; living relatively comfortably; overcoming the hand-to-mouth mentality that so many independent filmmakers (where we began) often find themselves in; and, most importantly, taking the time needed to slowly develop one’s mediocre ideas into the best version of themselves.

The story of how my incredible team (South African producer Marion Isaacs, Colombian co-producers Viviana Gómez Echeverry and Sonia Barrera, US executive producers Jessica Devaney, Anya Rous, and Brenda Robinson, and British executive producer Charlotte Cook) and I raised funds is an epic novel that is still being written, as we still need over US$300 000. Right now, it feels like our grant-acquiring chips are all used up.

After years of being able to work on this film full-time, we’re now in the all-too-familiar place where many filmmakers find themselves at the end of the process. We haven’t been able to pay our salaries in months, we still owe significant sums for things such as archive and music licences, and we’re in personal debt because seeing the film through became more important than maintaining our healthy credit.

While we wait for distributors to acquire the film, all I can really rely on again is the cosmic faith that has carried us to this moment. And just because that faith is unwavering, doesn’t mean that I’m not petrified on some level that maybe I will end up a broke artist. Though last night, with what little money I have, I booked tickets to go home to do umqombothi to thank my ancestors for the road we’ve travelled, and to make offerings for the flow of money to keep going.

• From the March edition of Wanted, 2023.