kagablog

San Francisco Cinematheque

‘”No event that begins without undoing us, no love that begins without killing us.’ This sentence refers to the electroshock produced by the images and sounds of Ian Kerkhof s film. He cries out his thwarted love affair with a country which he does not want to hate, which he was forced to leave and which he still wants to believe in. Still wants to believe in even if electing a black president does not suffice to turn around the fate of an entire people. Kerkhof sounds the alarm bell so that an abortive appointment with History can be avoided. His solution? Dying, loving, being bom again. A trinity.

“A morbid trinity, made up of a black man, an Afrikaner and an English man, make a descent into hell and meet up with the obsessional world of the filmmaker, who explores the ins and outs of a society sick within itself, with apartheid. South Africa is exposed naked in its ugliest, most shameful feature: rape. This ubiquitous parable takes on all forms: sexual, verbal, political, moral, psychological.

‘”Nice to meet you, please don’t rape me’. Interrupted by torrents of obscenities, this prayer is hummed during the entire film. It also becomes a dream where fiction and reality are blended, such as when the actors, stepping out of their roles, reveal, perhaps in spite of themselves, the demons that haunt them.

“Paradoxically, the film is a hymn to love. Raping in order to die, forgiving in order to love, living in order to be born again. It is a harsh, jarring, caustic film about the absurdity of a society in which the only genuine victory today over apartheid is the fact that a black or white woman is raped every 83 seconds. ‘It’s monstrous, but South Africa is like that.’”

— Miss N’Gone Fall, Revue Noire, June 1995

“This film is an analysis of South African society using the metaphor of rape. The film perceives South Africa as a rape culture, wherein the relationships between men and women have been so perverted by a history of colonialism, apartheid and violence that people cannot engage in normal social intercourse. The film is about three men, an un-holy trinity, but they are not real characters, not real individuals. They function to present the audience with archetypes and concepts. The narrative developments lead to the men raping each other, but not just sexually, they also do so verbally. The possibility of friendship between themselves is polluted by their violent backgrounds.

“The actors were prepared to enrich the film with a lot of personal experience. That’s clear from the acting level but also a great deal of the script information came from them: an Afrikaner, a black man and a white English speaker - they represent different aspects of South African society. Under apartheid all the inhabitants of South Africa learned to live with hate; that there has been a democratic election does not automatically mean that all that hate will just evaporate.

“I am appalled at how superficially the media treats South Africa: as if the election day ended an entire history. But hate is still brewing in people’s hearts, even if it isn’t legitimized by the state any more. That is what I wanted to show in the film. I compare this film to a huge ripe boil; it is full of pus, but only once that boil has been burst and the pus has seen the light of day can one even think of the healing beginning. This was the process that the actors went through. After a few days the trust was established and then in the free space of the rehearsal room anything was possible. A lot of really terrible stuff came up. Racial hatred has been deeply impregnated in black and white South Africans, regardless of education levels and financial privilege. The space that the actors received in order to express that hatred was very satisfying for them.

“I get letters from all three actors who are still to an extent dealing with the after effects of the openness with which they dealt with each other during the shooting. I think you can see that clearly in the final scene of the film in which the men are literally chained to each other: despite all the terrible stuff they have done to each other they still have to face the future together. It is a simple metaphor but I wanted it to be clear and I hope that South Africans get the opportunity to see the film. People have found the film extremely pessimistic… but for me it is about the insight that these people are bound together because of the appalling history that they share. So I see it as a hopeful film. Not a pleasant, but definitely an honest, film.”

— Ian Kerkhof

Ian Kerkhof was bom in South Africa in 1964. In 1994, he completed his studies at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy. He has made several short films and five full-length films, including Kyodai Makes the Big Time .

from the Program Notes Booklet 1996 san francisco cinematheque, see here