An honours film from the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance (AFDA) will represent South Africa in the 35th annual Student Academy Awards. “Kammakastig Land’ will compete against the top international student films in the category of Honorary Foreign Film Student Award at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Los Angeles in June.
The Student Academy Awards is an annual competition conducted by the Academy and the Academy Foundation. Every year over 500 film schools and universities across the US enter works to be judged in the following four categories: Animation, Documentary, Narrative and Alternative. Added to these is an award which honours a film outside of the US, contested worldwide by all CILECT member film schools. In 2006 another AFDA production, “Elalini’, won the Student Oscar for Foreign Film.
“Kammakastig Land’, written and directed by Brandon Oelofse, tells the story of Fourie, a young Afrikaans man who after the loss of his father sets out on a journey from Johannesburg to Cape Town to throw his father’s ashes off the edge of the Cape Point. During the journey Fourie finds a true sense of the man his father was, and by confronting the past ultimately finds his future in the process.
The film is a meditation on the current identities that have emerged out of and into the transition towards the new South Africa, focusing in and around the psyche of the White Afrikaans Male and all that it represents in the context of the past, present and future of South Africa. The narrative uses a number of devices: the classic American Western, the Road Movie and the parallel narrative (past and present) to guide its translation, meaning and style. The film is a comment on the marginalisation of a previously favoured group that has lost its way and seeks to find identity. Through the narrative the journey is, a reversal of the Groot Trek legacy from Cape Town to Johannesburg in essence redefining the identity of the Afrikaner youth.
