It is appropriate that Shirley Adams, a South African film with a narrative style rarely — if ever — attempted in this country, has just as unique a story behind it.
The DV8-produced R3-million film premieres at the Durban International Film Festival and, according to its first-time director, Oliver Hermanus, his personal rise is “one of those stories which is never supposed to happen”. In 2006 Roland Emmerich, the German director of Hollywood blockbusters such as Independence Day, was in Cape Town scouting locations for his film 10 000BC.
Hermanus, then working as a press photographer, met him and the film’s director of photography, Ueli Steiger, through a mate who was planning a book to accompany the film.
Hermanus says: “The book never worked out, but at the end of the conversation I explained to Mr Emmerich that I wanted to go to film school. He gave me a list of some of the major schools around and said if I got accepted by one of them — without using his name as influence — he’d pay for my studies.”
The next stop for Hermanus, a film media and visual studies graduate from the University of Cape Town, was the London Film School (LFS), alma mater of directors such as Mike Leigh and Michael Mann. Shirley Adams, a script he had been “writing, throwing away and then revisiting” for the past 10 years, became his master’s thesis.
“Emmerich has become my mentor. He’s an amazing teacher and director who allowed me insight into the Hollywood filmmaking process through access to the sets of 10 000BC and 2012,” says Hermanus.
Emmerich’s style of formulaic skop-skiet-and-donder filmmaking stands in sharp contrast to the approach of the precociously talented 26-year-old Capetonian, who admits being attracted to the social realism of Ken Loach.
In his time overseas Hermanus says the LFS exposed him to “a variety of filmmaking techniques, particularly processes which are not exactly anti-American, but which follow character rather than plot”. He admits to revelling in “unconventional storytelling techniques”.
And Shirley Adams, the story of a Cape Flats mother struggling to care — materially, emotionally and physically — for her teenage son rendered paraplegic by a gang shooting, certainly is the antithesis of Hollywood narrative norms.
The viewer spends much of the film staring at the back of the head of the eponymous protagonist, played by Denise Newman, as she tends to her son’s needs: his physical and psychological scars.
It is a film about race, class and violence on the Cape Flats — as much as it is a universal story of familial love and struggle. Yet one does not feel invaded by these themes.
He says his method of storytelling “is to create drama by avoiding dramatic scenes, but using anti-drama, like the Austrian Michael Haneke”.
His mainly hand-held camerawork was “motivated by the need to get closer and closer to Shirley, so the viewer really got into what she was doing”.
The Mail & Guardian spoke to Hermanus a few days after his return from a Paris interview with Cannes president Gilles Jacob for the festival’s Cinefondation residency programme, aimed at nurturing new international filmmaking talent: “It was like meeting the pope,” he says, gushing.
Hermanus made the cut and in October will start a four-and-a-half- month residency in the French capital, working on his second film, Elective Affinity. Shirley Adams has also been included in competition at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland in August.
It has been a swift rise for Hermanus, who started writing Shirley Adams at the age of 15.
The idea for the script was sparked by a dinner-table conversation with his sister, an occupational therapy student who had encountered a reallife case.
Given the story’s gravity, Hermanus went in search of a method that would uplift rather than depress: “I wanted to avoid the heavy-handed approach to dealing with redemption, loss and forgiveness, which seems to plague South African cinema.”
The world premiere of Shirley Adams takes place at the Suncoast Casino on July 25 at 8pm. There will be further screenings on July 26 and August 2