Filmmaking Workshop with Pluto Panoussis

Exploring B-Movie Culture: A Workshop by Pluto Panoussis

When I was freelancing as a designer I was approached by a client in Cape Town who had just recently bought the rights to an American exploitation film called I Spit on Your Grave. The brief: “Make it sell!” I watched the film and was both fascinated and repulsed. On the one hand it was a horrid exploitative revenge-rape tale about a woman that gets abused and then single-mindedly sets out to right the wrongs that have been committed to her. On the other hand, however, here was a shockingly defiant feminist film, described by one critic as “perhaps the most stridently anti-masculine film ever made by a male filmmaker”. Applying a “fine” design sensibility to the subject at hand was my first overt excursion into the zone of B-movie culture and to the exhilarating notion of the possibility of finding dignity in disgrace. This is a workshop investigating B-movie culture and its viability as a source of inspiration to African filmmakers where limited budget is, and will most probably continue to be, a determining factor on how we make films.tor is.”