By Dylan Valley
This year’s edition of The Durban International Film Festival in South Africa was a pure cinematic treat. I attended master classes with Burkina Faso film legend Gaston Kabore and surf film legend Jack McCoy, hung out with some of my favourite filmmakers, and saw some truly great films from around the world. Of these, one of the highlights was the African premiere of 27 year-old South African Oliver Hermanus’ latest feature, “Skoonheid” (Beauty.) The film made Cannes history earlier this year: It was the first Afrikaans film to screen at the festival and the first official French/ South African co- production ever. It went on to win the Queer Palm at Cannes and in Durban it won Best South African Feature.
“Skoonheid” (trailer above) tells the story of a middle aged Afrikaner man, Francois van Heerden (superbly played by Deon Lotz) who through painstakingly compartmentalizing his life, suppresses his sexual preference for men. Beneath his Calvinist family man façade lies a deeply unhappy and frustrated man. He engages in secret sexual orgies on a farm with other Afrikaans men who are also hiding their sexual preferences. Some of his peers are plainly in denial: “No gays and no coloureds allowed!” says one of the characters as he chases a member of their group away who had brought a brown skinned gay youth along. However, desperate sex with other suppressed men doesn’t seem to bring him any real happiness or even relief. He is in a permanent state of quiet internal conflict. He feels disenfranchised and unsafe in the new South Africa. He is like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. When he has an encounter with an old friend’s son at a wedding, he is mesmerized by his beauty, and his grip over his life begins to slip. We undergo a journey with him: as Hermanus puts it, “a journey that is conflicted and laced with self loathing.” Both terrifying and fascinating, “Skoonheid” is uncharted territory in the South African film terrain. I caught with up Oliver Hermanus in Cape Town to discuss the film.
