It really started in 2013 where a producer friend of mine and I came down to Cape Town looking for a story for a feature film. I told him “dude we gotta take the train, head to Kalk Bay and you gotta see that coast.” We did and took a couple of still 35mm cameras, hung out in the harbor took some photos and spoke to people … we knew there was something there. We just didn’t know what the story was, and then it just fell in the background.

In 2018, I had written this script, I was introduced to (producer) Khosie Dali through Imran Hamdulay, who also produced and did production design on the film. I wrote this script called Lie of the Land about a white family who moves into a home in Protea Village and the people whose home it was tries to get it back. It was a bit ambitious for a first feature, and Khosi was like “I don’t think we can do this on $5,000!” I was starting low. I knew we could raise more money, but I realized we had to do this on a shoestring.

So, I put that away and I decided to do something very documentary style—with a few actors and a very simple story. I started to think about my own home in California, and about the themes I wanted to explore, and I wanted to explore brotherhood. I went back to this old story in the Mexican American community about this diver called Mechudo who goes diving as part of this contest. He gets greedy and goes for the biggest pearl and dies down in the water. There are many iterations of this story. He was also a Yaqui Indian, who are an incredible tribe that my family is descended from. This story was picked up by John Steinbeck, who wrote the novella The Pearl, and these became the two inspirations that I thought could be something that I could transplant to Cape Town. From there I started returning to Cape Town and talking to the young kids who live in the fisherman cottages, hanging out with them, watching them surf, etcetera and kind of approaching the story from a documentary angle, not really sure where it was going. I would hear little pieces of what they were up against. I came across the book The Poacher by [South African journalist] Kimon de Greef around the same time, and I became friends with him. And then I just started doing this deep dive into the abalone scene which is incredible. And then I realized this is not just about people trying to make a quick buck, this is everything. This is a global story. This is people trying to survive off their sea that they can no longer survive from.

You can go into the crime story, where it’s about gangsters, it’s about the Chinese triad, and it’s about drugs that get pumped into the Cape Flats in exchange for abalone that gets sold in China for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. For me, the abalone that Gabe and Mikhail find, that’s the bag of treasure, the “McGuffin” that pulls you through the story. At the core of the story, it’s about a group of men who come from a place in the world, who lived off that place, and they’ve been displaced. Because of systemic racism and the history of colonialism, they’re struggling to survive in the place they’re from. And that’s a universal story that connects to my people back home; the Black community, the Native American community and the Hispanic community. When they watch this film, they see themselves reflected in it. So, while I was telling a very specific South African story, in that specificity, I was telling a global story about brownness and blackness in a world that’s been colonized.

There are profound similarities in the landscape, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area where I’m from and Cape Town, that incredible, breath-taking meeting of mountain and sea. Then there are the radical differences between the wealthy and the impoverished—though of course those differences are much more intense in Cape Town. At an intimate level, I sense and feel a familiarity between brown Cape Town and mestizo California—the same history of cultural collision, of being a mix of indigenous people, folks brought over by force and settlers. Other things are familiar too: the coming together of family in large numbers over food, the fashioning of the individual as a part of a collective, of a community. So there are both painful and beautiful markers of sameness.

The initial financiers recommended three white male actors for the role of Peterson, the government official but we (the producers) met as a group and decided to decline the offer. For two main reasons; I wanted to de-centralize whiteness in the film, though of course, it’s a consistent feature, the colonial imprint is everywhere, in the landscape, in the paintings, in the entire social context/construct of the boys’ world. But also, it was important because the official needed to come from the same world as the boys, and in a sense, all four of the male characters (from the little boy to the grown man) are representative of a single life and how trapped we can be by history. Also, it always hurts more when your own enact violence on you, we know that, and there’s a difficult, complicated history of how that happens.