/ 21 August 2009

Durban á la Dickens

About an hour into the award-winning Izulu Lami (My Secret Sky) there was an overwhelming need to bump the country out of the two main protagonists, Thembi (Sobahle Mkabase) and Khwesi (Sibonelo Mabizela), who have navigated their way from rural KwaZulu-Natal to the hard streets of Durban.

Such is the ponderous nature of the film, which delves into the darker recesses of the feral lives of street children and explores the resilience of hope.

The cast of Izulu Lami, mostly children, is sensitively directed by documentary filmmaker Madoda Ncayiyana in his first feature film. Extensive workshopping has elicited some moving performances from the first-time actors, with Mkhabase winning the best actress award at the Tarifa Festival in Spain earlier this year. But the film lacks narrative momentum and verve, plodding along towards its inevitable happy conclusion — to the detriment of the audience’s empathy for the children going through harrowing experiences while living on the streets.

The plot, at times, lacks everyday realism. When, for example, Thembi and Khwesi find the priest they have been looking for, their conversation charges directly into matters relating to arts and craft. The simple every-day conversation — of how these two recently orphaned prepubescents have found their way from the rural areas to a man they hardly know — is not mentioned.

Izulu Lami is a longer version of a 12-minute short film made in 2001, The Sky in Her Eyes, co-directed by Ncayiyana and Ouida Smit, which won the Djibril Diop Mambety Prize for best African short film at Cannes in 2003. Earlier this year Ncayiyana said The Sky in Her Eyes was the inspirational “short poem” for this “longer novel”.

It follows the experiences of Thembi and Khwesi who, stuck with an uncaring and abusive aunt when their mother dies, leave the backwaters of KwaZulu-Natal for Durban. They carry with them a particularly special hand-woven mat made by their mother, which comes to represent their chance at a better future.

They go in search of a white priest who used to commission mats from their mother, hoping to enter it into a craft competition. The early part of the film, charting the funeral and the duo’s journey, is beautifully shot.

After a long trek they discover a quasi-Dickensian world very different from the one they left behind. They fall in with a street urchin called Chilli-Bite (Tshepang Mohlomi) and his gang and become slowly exposed to the vagaries of urban life on the streets.
From a cocooned rural existence they become intimate with life’s meaner side: rape, prostitution and drug abuse are just some of the issues they are confronted with.

Izulu Lami, which also won the Dikalo best feature film prize at the International Pan-African Film Festival in Cannes in April, does not deal lightly with these issues. Nor can it be characterised as a simplistic interrogation of the clash of the urban and the rural: when Thembi is pimped off to a john for virginal sex to cure Aids, any romantic notion of rural beliefs and life is eviscerated.

But the plodding script detracts from the horror these children face. It somehow dislocates the viewer from the children’s experiences, which, for a film of this nature, is a serious failing.