Winner of the best director award, Sibs Shongwe-La Mer, looks at the narcissism of society in his first feature film, writes Sarah Dawson.
In unassuming lower case, the words “in loving memory of 1991 …” float against a black screen, carving fine, blood-red lines into the otherwise mostly bleak, greyscale impression of Johannesburg in Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s first feature, Necktie Youth. The self-consciously cryptic preface can only be assumed to be an obituary to the birth year of the 23-year-old director, and it strikes the mournful opening chords of the surprisingly tender elegy to youth that follows.
With five nihilistic words, the spirit of renaissance that may once have characterised the South African experience is inverted and grieved. Built on the foundation of real-life experience, the film beautifully observes the aftermath of tragedy among a hedonistic, multiracial circle of suburban young adults. It slots (not incidentally, I suspect) into a well-established cinematic tradition in the vein of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) and Ken Park (2002), or Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003), but Shongwe-La Mer’s undeniable talent and novelty lie in his successful transposition of garden-variety adolescent ennui into a metaphor of existential stillbirth in a post apartheid era of disillusionment, hyper-mediation and alienation: I am, because I am going to die.
As profound as it is precocious, Necktie Youth represents the first really distinctive cinematic voice to emerge from a generation of young South Africans to whom the country’s pre-democratic history is largely a second-hand abstraction.
At last weekend’s closing ceremony of the Durban International Film Festival, Necktie Youth won an award for best South African feature film and Shongwe-La Mer also took home the prize for best direction.
It is clear from this debut that Shongwe-La Mer has an innate ability for richness in cinema that is driven by sensitivity and complexity, and which exists in the intuitive detail. Certainly a talent to watch, the young director’s first work is soulful and effortless in a way that suggests it was propelled by a need for personal catharsis. It will be fascinating to see what he does next.
The film Necktie Youth opens in cinemas across the country on September 18.
For full report by Sarah Dawson visit Mail & Guardian
Trailer: click here
