Thinus Ferreira
Beer Adriaanse's biographical, band origin and gig film Vergeet My Nie (Forget Me Not) making its debut at kykNET's 2024's 12th Silwerskermfees film festival, would never have happened had his parent not cleared out a storeroom discovering a black crate with multiple video cassettes filled with amateur footage.
In Vergeet My Nie, Beer Adriaanse takes the viewer on a jaw-dropping, archive-compiled journey to yesterday and the late analogue era of the early 2000s when the Afrikaans rock group Zinkplaat had its origin in which Adriaanse was the drummer.
Beer Adriaanse is also the writer, director and narrator of Vergeet My Nie which depicts the origin and countrywide tours by bus of Zinkplaat.
Produced by Idea Candy and DPK with music from Zinkplaat, Foto Na Dans, eF-eL, the Straatligkinders, Tidal Waves and New Holland, Vergeet My Nie can best be described as a biographical, first-person, band and music concert story.
Through the eyes and shaky-cam clips of Beer Adriaanse and his "were-they-ever-that-young?" bandmates two decades ago, the viewer gets a glimpse of an almost-forgotten, yet seminal period in the rise of alternative Afrikaans music at the start of this century.
In multiple unguarded moments none of them ever likely thought would ever be shown on a big screen, Zinkpaat band members live in tents, collab with other emerging Afrikaans bands and Adriaanse lives out his boyhood diary dreams of having and playing in his own band.
Ouma would indeed be proud - except for the loud music.
Similar to Disney+'s 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back, the short film depicting the Zinkplaat origin story, has an interesting origin story of itself: A forgotten black plastic crate filled with DV8-video cassettes, old paper diaries scribbled with notes and dreams, as well as a lot of photos.
When Beer Adriaanse's parents packed up when they relocated from the Strand, they made the discovery and told their son of his forgotten material.
"Through all the years we recorded our band concerts in the hope of one day making something of it," the 39-year-old tells me. "We found a hard drive with unbelievable material from the first and second tour of Zinkplaat that I thought was lost forever to time."
"For me as a fan of filmmaking and film art it is incredible how the formats of a time period give you this unvarnished glimpse of the time during which it was recorded. It was an immense challenge and a lot of hard work to digitise all of this - from the video cassette to the start of digital cards in handy cams."
"It's fortuitous that somehow, somebody always had a camera and captured what we were busy with," Adriaanse says.
Two terabytes of footage were captured - each December over seven years - with different cameras.
Beer Adriaanse went through all of this to create the fascinating short film which in the end transitions to how everyone the viewer meets and spends time with during the story - like fellow band mates Bertie Coetzee and Dirkie van der Merwe - look today.
"We were all very young and it was long before the time before people became aware of how selfies would influence and change our lives and how and what cellphones would become. So everyone on camera was really just themselves. Everyone behaved when the camera captured them as if nobody would ever see it."
"People just partied up a storm. The worst is probably joints being smoked and people drinking and making out."
Beer Adriaanse is still good friends with Bertie Coetzee and Dirkie van der Merwe. "Because it's a lost chapter, the people who were a part of it never thought there would be a story about it. We were part of a wave; a movement. Zinkplaat took place within a specific context."
Adriaanse says the filmmaking process "led to so many emotions I'm still processing".
"It was such a crazy experience to spend so many months with my younger self and my friends' younger versions - looking in a mirror back at yourself and how you were."
