Sea Point Days, a feature-length documentary film by Emmy award-winning South African filmmaker Francois Verster, has been selected for screening in the prestigious Joris Ivens competition section at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). It is one of the few South African documentaries ever to receive this honour, and the only South African film in competition at IDFA this year. He film recently had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival,
The film, produced by Lucinda Englehart and Neil Brandt of Luna Films, looks at life at Cape Town’s Sea Point promenade and at its municipal pools. Sea Point Days not only celebrates this unusual and beautiful space, but also paints a deeply reflective picture of old white South Africa in transition and the frictions of a society in flux. It appeared on more than one “top ten of the fest’ lists at Toronto, and was described as “a beautiful, troubled and incisively critical epitaph to a not-quite-departed world.’
Verster (The Mothers’ House, A Lion’s Trail and When the War is Over) describes Sea Point Days as his most personal film so far: “The film aims from a very personal perspective to give shape to some of the emotional contradictions of being South African at this point. Rather than working from a character or a number of characters’ point of view, it tries to integrate social, physical and perhaps spiritual elements within the area in different ways. It also tries to use cinematic means to break the sense of seeming dead-endness that has come to surround certain debates within South Africa.’
Sea Point Days was funded by ITVS International, the Jan Vrijman Fund, Visions Sud Est, the National Film and Video Foundation and Spier Films. The film has already been invited to other high profile festivals such as competition screening at this year’s Dubai International Film Festival and Planete Doc Review in Warsaw next year.
