Darrell Roodt must be South Africa’s most prolific working director. In the 1980s, he knocked together City of Blood, Place of Weeping, The Stick and Jobman, at least one of which is actually quite good, before going on to bigger-budget outings such as Sarafina! and Cry, the Beloved Country. Between then and last year’s Oscar nominee, Yesterday, there was a slew of B-movies that went to DVD so fast no one has heard of them — including a Fu Manchu rip-off and a Dracula-in-space epic described on one website as ”so bad it’s almost great”.
One shouldn’t be surprised, then, at Roodt’s new movie, though one is. After all the international attention Yesterday got, Roodt might plausibly have gone for something bigger, glossier and even more earnest. But no. What he did, in fact, was grab a whole lot of old film stock and shoot a quick movie about a homeless person on the streets of Johannesburg, in about a week flat. And with a hand-cranked camera, nogal.
Faith’s Corner is the movie. Leleti Khumalo plays homeless Faith, as if dying of Aids weren’t enough tragedy for one career. Faith’s two children share her desperate circumstances, and the movie is about just how desperate she gets. What’s amazing is how powerful, without being maudlin, it all is; and how it was achieved with so little. It doesn’t even have dialogue — just title cards like in the old silent movies. And we could even have done without so many of those.
It does have a Philip Glass soundtrack, which is more or less incessant, but does its dramatic job when needed. We are almost lulled by the grinding misery of Faith’s life into believing that it can’t get worse, but it can, and the tale packs a devastating punch. The washed-out film stock, in which blues predominate, is actually perfect for this story of denuded urban survival — it couldn’t have worked better had it been graded to within an inch of its life.