kagablog

hoshino mai and thom hoffman in shabondama elegy (1999)

Ian Kerkhof was born in Johannesburg in 1964. He left South Africa to avoid military service in the apartheid army and received political asylum in the Netherlands in 1984. He studied film direction and screenwriting at the Netherlands Film & Television Academy. His debut feature was awarded the Golden Calf, the Dutch equivalent of the Oscar, for Best Film in 1992. He subsequently won many international awards at film festivals including Best Documentary for Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994) at the European Film Salon, Berlin. That film also won the Best Film Prize at the Experimental Film Festival of Madrid.

Kerkhof made the first post-apartheid feature film in South Africa, Nice To Meet You, Please Don’t Rape Me! (1995). Its world premiere was held in Ougadougou at FESPACO where it was the first South African film to participate in the competition programme. The film starred Eric Miyeni and was described by the Dutch art critic, Anna Tilroe, as follows: ‘In this work we follow four men, three black and one white, who have found each other on the seamy side of life in South Africa and try to help each other out as best they can. None of them has an identity in the form of a legal name, a permanent place of residence, a wife, family or possessions. All we learn about them is that they are lost in a society that is marked by vengeance, moral degeneration, and spiritual and physical violation. Their mutual suspicion and aggression, often influenced by alcohol and drugs, lead to fierce outbursts of rage and violence that they are constantly struggling to keep in check with regard to each other by means of pacifying rituals. Each one perceives to a greater or lesser degree that he needs the other, not so much to survive in a desolate, bloodthirsty urban jungle, because these men don’t attach all that much to life. What connects them, rather, is a longing, the longing to preserve whatever shred of human dignity is left to them.’

Kerkhof went on to make the world’s first film shot on digital video tape and blown up to 35mm. The film was called NAAR DE KLOTE in the Netherlands and released internationally as WASTED! (1996). Kerkhof then travelled to Japan where he made the first Japanese film shot in this process, starring the famous porn actress Mai Hoshino and Thom Hoffman. SHABONDAMA ELEGY (1999) received a Golden Calf (the Dutch Oscar equivalent) and was highly controversial because of the many explicit sex scenes in the film and much other material considered blasphemous and indecent. Kerkhof’s last film was THE SEVEN LAST WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST (2001).

Is Kerkhof a moralist? You would almost think so to look at the sharpness with which he renders the moral decay of his characters. But morality as a system of ethical principles and norms is incompatible with what for Kerkhof constitutes the artistic vocation. For him, good and evil are concepts like identity: they lay down in the form of rules and regulations that which is essentially fleeting and mutable and, above all, infinitely nuanced. Morality is tantamount to a denial of the depth of the human spirit, a depth that, oddly enough, is mainly perceptible in what is generally regarded as evil. And that is the area in which Kerkhof chooses to be active.