Film reviews: 3 movies to check out at the South African Film Festival, from a must-see family drama to powerful documentaries
Barakat takes you to the Cape Flats; Zero to Zero zooms in on a Pretoria hospital struggling with COVID; and Murder in Paris unravels a mystery
The South African Film Festival streams Canada-wide online from November 4 to 14.
Barakat
Barakat is, on its surface, a comical love story and family drama that revolves around matriarch Aisha Davids (Vinette Ebrahim), a Black Muslim widow whose four grown sons refuse to accept the new love in her life, a Christian doctor, who proposes two years after her husband’s passing. But it’s so much more than that. Taking its name from the Arabic word for “blessing”, the film boasts many firsts, making it a 2021 must-see.
Director Amy Jeptha shot Barakat in South Africa’s Cape Flats, a flat, sandy area just outside of Cape Town that’s rarely seen on film and that’s typically associated with drugs, crime, and gang violence. Jeptha sheds the region in a much more positive and hopeful light, home to middle-class families like the Davids and to Cape Dutch architecture with its grandiose, colourful facades. It’s the first film in the world to be shot in Afrikaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans with words from English, Dutch, Malay, and Arabic. And it’s a rare portrayal of a relatable Black Muslim South African family, one that’s just like any other anywhere the world with all its conflict, caring, commitment, teasing, prodding, tension, affection, bonding, and love.
To break the news of her romance to her children, Aisha invites her sons and their wives to the family home for Eid-al-Fitr. Known as Labarang in Cape Town, the “festival of breaking the fast” is a celebratory occasion that marks the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting for Muslims. After an amusing misunderstanding of their mother’s situation, the sons grapple with their unprocessed grief for their father and their complex feelings about their mom moving on.
Even as it illustrates religious and cultural practices (including a scene shot in a local mosque), the film has a lighthearted tone. When Aisha is defending her desire to be with her new partner to a close relative, for instance, she says, “Look at my glow,” to which her confidante responds, “Glow? That’s not a glow. That’s menopause.”
Barakat has a moving warmth to it that’s deepened by South African musician-composer Kyle Shepherd’s gorgeous piano score. >GJ
Zero to Zero
What sets this hospital-set documentary about health workers battling the COVID crisis apart is the unprecedented access the filmmaker has. As a radiologist, Leonie Scholtz is already on the frontlines and has built trust with the doctors facing a rising tide of patients.
In fact, the part-time filmmaker is right there shooting when the the first COVID patient arrives at Zuid-Afrikaans Hospital (ZAH), a nonprofit medical centre in Pretoria. She had time to prepare: as the rest of the world faced its cataclysmic first wave in spring 2020, the African nation nervously awaited the full force of the pandemic, which hit hard in July 2020.
Scholtz and another cameraman kept on shooting over 15 months, as the century-old institution grappled with increasing numbers of patients—eventually moving all other emergency services outdoors under tents in the parking lot.
We meet doctors shaken by the ever-present threat of death in the ICU, and the speedy progress of a disease where patients arrive, still speaking and conscious—eerily “happy hypoxies” —despite critically low oxygen saturation and imminent intubation.
Zero to Zero avoids gratuitous footage, its most powerful moments the interviews with doctors as the crisis evolves. The film is a gripping reminder of the sacrifice of healthcare workers around the globe; here, physicians and nurses articulate the emotional toll—whether it’s the inability to touch a patient or their trepidation over conveying bad news to a family.
It’s not all as dark as it sounds: there’s hope here, too, in the patients of all colours, social status, and ages we meet here—including a teenager who fights the odds, and her family forced to anxiously wait at home. You can feel the staff draw energy from those success stories to fight on. Zero to Zero humanizes the statistics, and displays a kind of solidarity of healthcare workers that stretches across the world. >JS
Dulcie September, pictured in Murder in Paris..
Murder in Paris
On March 29, 1988, someone gunned down South African ex-pat and anti-Apartheid activist Dulcie September in her French apartment building. Thousands marched the streets of Paris to protest her murder. Was this a brazen assassination in a foreign country on behalf of the Apartheid regime?
Murder in Paris travels from the French capital to Capetown, Johannesburg, and beyond in an attempt to unravel a mystery that takes on all the intrigue of a spy thriller.
The filmmakers find their guide in unlikely Dutch activist and investigative journalist Evelyn Groenink, who’s devoted an unimaginable three decades to the case. Her research uncovers September’s work sanctions-busting, the international weapons trade, and even the role of banks and the nuclear-energy trade. All that is set against a backdrop of a rising French right wing, UN sanctions, and infighting within the African National Congress. Director Enver Samuel tracks down an exhaustive slate of interview subjects, from Dulcie’s friends and family to ANC members and political experts, to weigh in on the crime—a cold case France gave up on long ago.
At the same time, Samuel shades in the personal details of a fascinating subject: a single woman whose friends say was “married to the cause” of the ANC—someone traumatized by her imprisonment in South Africa as a naive young activist, and then forced to live in exile. One of the most telling details is that no one, not even her ANC superiors, takes her seriously when she’s worried about being followed.
Above all, Mystery in Paris is a compelling flashback to a period not that long ago, when the world was trying to put an economic squeeze on a rogue nation bent on segregation. And it's still shocking to think that could lead to a woman being brutally gunned down at home—five bullets to the head—thousands of miles away from her homeland. >JS
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