Africa Is a Country

Oliver Hermanus at Cannes

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African Five-a-Side Podcast

Oliver Hermanus at Cannes

By
Sean Jacobs

“Skoonheid,” the new film by South African director Oliver Hermanus will be screened in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (starting next month). He is in good company. Check the Cannes site to see who else got invited.

The film is also the first Afrikaans film to be included in Cannes Film Festival’s official program. The film–the title translates as “Beauty”– “… tells the story of Francois van Heerden, a mid-40s, white, Afrikaans-speaking family man living in Bloemfontein, who has become devoid of any care or concern for his own measure of happiness, and so convinced of his ill-fated existence, that he is wholly unprepared when a chance encounter unravels his clean, controlled life.”

I like the film language of Hermanus (he studied film at the University of Cape Town, UC Santa Barbara and the London Film School), so I’m looking forward to seeing it whenever. Hermanus’ debut film, “Shirley Adams,” which I saw at the New York African Film Festival last year, a claustrophobic film about the desperate lives of a working class woman and her disabled son, is definitely worth a look.

Sources: Film Contact, Festival du Cannes, Screen Daily

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