Brazilian classic, Iranian social critique and African voices among cinematic gems at Durban International Film Festival

The 45th edition of the Durban International Film Festival gets under way next week and so for this week’s column, you’ll have to make your way off the couch and down to the sea to catch some of the highlights of what is always a solidly varied and satisfying selection of films.

There’s a stone-cold Brazilian classic, an uncompromising social critique from an Iranian master and a bold new film from a rising voice of African cinema, all available on the big screen if you’re willing to make the short trip to the warm winter climes of the Indian Ocean.

For the full schedule and further details of this year’s festival visit ccadiff.ukzn.ac.za

The arthouse essential:

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof has proved to be a thorn in the side of his country’s government who have done their best to silence him over the course of his two-decade career.

Arrested often by Iranian authorities and having his passport seized to prevent him from attending festivals, Rasoulof’s most recent battle with the government caused him to be sentenced to eight years in prison, whipped and fined before the premiere of this film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Luckily the director managed to flee Iran for Germany and attend the premiere, even if he now must live in exile from the country that has provided him with so much angry inspiration for his socially critical dramas.

Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 2022 protests by women against the vicious patriarchal authoritarianism of the Iranian government, this almost three-hour film centres on the character of Iman, a dedicated civil servant who is promoted to serve as an investigator for the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Court.

Though Iman has long wanted the promotion, he soon finds that it comes not only with a pay rise and better living conditions for his family but also with tensions and moral conflicts that cause him having to do things he doesn’t believe in and never thought he would.

When protests erupt on the streets of Tehran Iman finds himself in conflict with his wife and daughters and faced with a choice of whether to remain loyal to his superiors or support his family — a decision that’s made more difficult and potentially tragic after a gun that he’s been issued for his protection goes missing, and his suspicions fall on members of his own household.

Not always perfect in its execution but always urgently relevant and courageous in its willingness to shed light on the realities of life under the Iranian regime, Rasoulof’s film is a satisfying thriller and a provocative social examination that speaks to the injustices of the long history of oppression of women in his homeland.

The stone-cold classic:

City of God

It may make some viewers feel old to realise that Fernando Meirelles’s vibrant action drama breakout is now 22 years old but the film with its sharp pace, energetic editing, hand-held camera immediacy and sharply observed period details remains a stone-cold classic that’s stood the test of time.

Loosely focused on the social changes and evolution of the relationships between a group of characters connected by their relationship to a Rio de Janeiro social housing project, the film follows the changing fortunes of its characters and their environment from its beginnings in the 1960s as a hopeful place for poor Brazilians to live, to the 1980s when it becomes a violent space racked by the scourge of drugs and gangs.

As the very different ambitions of its two central characters — the clean-nosed wannabe photographer and an ambitiously ruthless wannabe gangster — come into increasing conflict, the depressing realities of the social situation around them become harder to ignore and ultimately threaten the peace of everyone and everything around them.

Stylish, free-wheeling but also keenly aware of the harsh realities that surround it, the film offers a not always comfortable perspective. But it’s an engaging look at life in the slums of Rio that, due to its true-story basis and use of nonprofessional actors from the favelas, has large doses of passion, empathy and feeling for its characters that prevent it from being merely a poverty porn action spectacle.

TRAILER:

The diamond in the rough

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Zambian-British writer-director Rungano Nyoni follows up her much acclaimed 2017 debut, I Am Not a Witch, with this riveting drama about intergenerational sisterhood and painful suppressed trauma in Zambia.

Shula is a young Zambian woman who when we are introduced to her is dressed in a strange, sci-fiesque costume driving home from a fancy dress party, when she stops at the sight of a dead body on the road. The body turns out to be that of her Uncle Fred.

As Shula becomes involved in informing her family of the death and attending the funeral for her uncle, dark secrets from the past begin to come to light and shed an accusatory gaze on the deeply misogynist attitudes of Shula’s family and broader patriarchal Zambian society.

It’s an angry but also empathetic examination of sexual violence, cycles of abuse and the tensions that these cause between women in families, across generations, told with singular visual flare and an ominous sonic landscape care of Lucretia Dalt and a determined refusal to offer easy answers.