Peter Machen spoke to director Oliver Hermanus about his debut film Shirley Adams when it premiered at the Durban International Film Festival.
Oliver Hermanus is driving when I phone him. He prefers it that way. It makes it easier for him to think. While he heads down the highway, I circle my balcony, talking eagerly to the director of what is easily one of the finest films produced in more than a century of South African film (admittedly, it is a sparsely populated century).
In fact Hermanus’ film Shirley Adams impressed me so much that it’s tempting to suggest that it is the finest film to emerge from the new South Africa. But then I think about how wowed I was by uCarmen eKhayelitsha and how much I really, really liked Hijack Stories and I am forced to place it simply, humbly, in the top ranks of the canon. More significantly though, Shirley Adams would sit comfortably with what might be called the art cinema of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers.
The film tells the simple story of Cape Flats resident Shirley Adams, whose husband has left her and who spends her days looking after her son Donavon, who is paralysed from the waist down as a result of a gang shooting. Lost in broken solace and haunted by the pain of her son’s disability, Adams lives a kind of half-life in the shadow of inconsolability and economic duresss. She is visited occasionally by friends and also by a young white middle-class occupational therapist. The two worlds of Cape Town are painfully evident but they are never dwelled upon. They are just there, even as they are, in many ways, the historic and contemporary cause of Adam’s pain and predicament.
Shirley Adams is a harrowing film, but given Hermanus’s treatment, it is also a very beautiful one. In the acknowledgement of Adam’s existence by the filmmaker, her life is somehow given salvation, her sufferings redeemed, all without a note of sentimentality. And as with all great art, some kind of transfer takes place, and our own salvation plays out, our own sufferings are redeemed through Hermanus’ quietly compassionate account of someone else’s life.
What does make the film stand out on the South African landscape, though is just how much Hermanus had extracted from limited resources, both financially (the film was made for R3 million which might sound like a lot but in film terms it’s peanuts) and cinematically (the film is set mostly in and around Adam’s modest house, with a handful of actors). And hopefully the profound artistic success that is Shirley Adams will inspire other young film-makers to follow their dreams, and produce some of those “small South African stories” which film-makers and film-writers and producers talk about so often but which almost just as often end up as far away from a “small” film as you can get.
Shirley Adams is unashamedly a “small” film and perhaps part of Hermanus’s success is that he realises that there’s no shame in that. In fact, the opposite is true, Hermanus seems to have realised the kind of artistic freedom that you can achieve with a small but intense canvas and no special effects at all. That this kind of wisdom comes from a twenty-seven year old first-time director makes the film all the more remarkable. That it began as a script he started writing as a fifteen-year old – as he tells me – somehow borders on outlandish.
Although Hermanus seems driven in his love for film and his ambitions as a filmmaker, he is particularly affable about the state of the film-making world and the compromises it contains. While I, as interviewer, sound out the notes of injustice in which such a low key masterpiece will end up in the ghetto of Ster Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau, he is far less pissed off. He is grateful for the distribution and remarks that at least most South African films that get made are shown here, no matter how left-field or experimental they are, whereas an obscure Iranian title probably wouldn’t get a release (although it should be said the Cinema Nouveau regularly shows less obscure Iranian films). He is also hugely grateful to have been given the chance to make a film in which there is no pressure for returns on investment – thanks to a private investor who kickstarted the film and local film unit DV8 who completed the financing.
He does mention, however, that it is our access to cinema that determines what it we want to see, or even if we want to see at all. If you’ve never had the chance – or money – to go to the cinema, cinema will always remain inaccessible. If you only ever get to see the films shown at the multiplexes, you’ll only ever want to see the kak that gets shown there. And the sad result of this is – my sentiment not Hermanus’ – that films like Shirley Adams might not even seem like films to many cinema goers.
He also talks about the fact that he himself can’t actually “see” Shirley Adams, a frustration that must be common to most people who make things. I suggest to him that he’ll be able to view it properly in perhaps five years time when the experience of making it has faded from his mind. “Yes. I’ll see all the mistakes,” he responds.
But perhaps he won’t. Perhaps he will manage to look past the concatenation of imperfections that only creators and the ultra-observant notice and get the chance to see what I see: an exquisitely rendered tale of an ordinary life told in notes that are as tender as they are beautiful, as beautiful as they are honest.
I dearly hope Oliver Hermanus gets that experience, just as I dearly hope that his remarkable films gets the critical and commercial success that it deserves.