Time reigns
Boundless and unyielding, caring only for what lies ahead
The land, its silent companion, bears the weight of its passage
Its shifting contours the only trace
Rain comes as a fleeting mercy
Soothing the land’s restless grief
But what if the rain faltered?
What if the land
No longer passive
Could rise and write its own history?
These are the opening words of The Trek, arriving in South African cinemas on Friday, 31 July, spoken in the Khoekhoen language of Khoekhoegowab.
Delivered by cultural custodian Collin Meyer, they set the tone for a potent blend of western, horror and psychological thriller.
Set in 1846 against the harsh, desolate landscape of the Kgalagadi desert, The Trek follows four settlers: Afrikaans farmer Karel Uys, his wife Jakoba, their young daughter Karolina and their English benefactor, Henry Blake.
Karel and Henry have struck a deal: if Karel can guide Blake through the unforgiving Kgalagadi, he’ll receive 200 hectares of land in return. But the journey quickly begins to unravel when Henry scares off both horses pulling their wagon, then later kills one of them.
More intriguingly, they’re joined by a mysterious Khoen man named Atshumao, who returns the remaining horse and offers to help them find water.
Without venturing into spoiler territory, there are forces at
work that neither Karel nor Henry understand or are prepared to confront. Although most of the film features only five actors, The Trek remains a tense and compelling piece of cinema.
The film first premiered in South Africa at the Joburg Film Festival earlier this year as part of an impressive international festival run.
It earned recognition in Brazil, Portugal and the UK, collecting awards for cinematography, directing and editing while also receiving nominations across major categories including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and acting honours.
The international acclaim has helped establish The Trek as one of South Africa’s standout independent films of the year. After festival screenings at Fantasporto, Fantaspoa and Raindance, the film arrives in South African cinemas with a growing reputation for its visual ambition and genre-defying storytelling.
Director Meekaeel Adam brought the vision to life, working from a script by James C Williamson, who also produced the film, alongside Sandulela Asanda and J Hannah Massyn. Adam initially joined the project as director of photography before eventually taking on the role of director.
He says various filmmakers had been approached before him. “For better or for worse, most of the people who were offered the film didn’t fully see eye to eye with either its ambition or concept for the budget that it was allocated,” he says.
Watching The Trek, it’s no surprise Adam was first brought on for his cinematography. Shot entirely in the Northern Cape, the film renders the harsh desert landscape with remarkable beauty, whether under the unforgiving sun or in the stillness of night. Part of the story unfolds inside a 28m-deep gorge that, at times, resembles an alien world straight out of a sci-fi flick.
Adam worked with a crew of between 60 and 70 people, depending on the location and time of day. They spent 21 days shooting before a sandstorm brought production to a halt. “When the land speaks, it speaks,” he says. “It spoke that day.”
The interruption forced the team to improvise, rewriting parts of the story to accommodate the new reality. It would be another year before they returned to the location for three more days of filming, a delay Adam describes as a curse and a blessing. “It made the story better from a writing point of view,” he says.
“It forced us to revisit that muscle of solution-orientation inside storytelling, so that you don’t try to redo what you’ve done or continue what you’ve done but you repackage it. It became more robust.”
There’s something fitting about a film concerned with the folly of men trying to conquer a landscape that has plans of its own being disrupted by the landscape. The making of The Trek echoed the story it set out to tell.
Maurice Carpede probably bore the brunt of the environment, spending the shoot wearing little more than traditional Khoen leather attire and walking barefoot, often across rocky terrain. “That landscape was absolutely amazing,” he says.
“It was beautiful. It was harsh. It was like a sixth character, another cast member in the film.”
He tells me the conditions ranged between punishingly hot during the day and excruciatingly cold during the night, especially when they had to shoot inside the cavernous bottom of a gorge a building’s length below ground level — a spot, he says, where the sun hardly ever shines.
The crew made efforts to help keep him warm, offering to put protective leather padding under his feet but he mostly declined. “I said to them: ‘No, don’t put this on. It’s fine. I’m okay. I can walk. Let me feel it.’”
Carpede had the difficult task of playing Atshumao, a character that is often more archetype than man. He says he and Adam had disagreements early on because Carpede wanted to give the character some tenderness while the director kept insisting he play Atshumao with a stoic and steely resolve.
“He’s very stoic, always in control, except right at the end where he just breaks down,” Carpede says. “I wanted to bring a bit of softness into him. I was like: ‘Come on, just let me soften him a little bit.’”
Adam saw it differently and framed the role for Carpede in terms bigger than the character on the page. “Don’t think of it as a role that you’re playing as one character,” he told him. “Imagine that you are representing an entire people as one. Remember, that’s your power. It’s in numbers, it’s in community, not as an individual.”
A character like this, a black man acting as the guide for a group of white people facing a difficult journey through the wilderness, could easily fall into the tropes of a noble savage or magical negro. And there will perhaps be some debate about whether the film entirely avoids that. But Carpede brings a compelling humanity to the role that allows him, beneath all that macho stoicism, to be the soul of the story.
The ever-reliable Rob van Vuuren plays a character who, to some degree, is an antagonist to Atshumao. The self-centred, lecherous Henry Blake could easily have tipped into one-dimensional villainy but van Vuuren says the character gave him plenty to work with.
“There’s so much — his dialogue is so rich and interesting and he’s also a consummate liar, so you don’t know what’s true and what isn’t,” he says. “It’s deliberately vague, which creates this sense of unease throughout the film.”
To make the performance feel layered, Van Vuuren built out a backstory the audience never sees.
“The root of all of that was a man who is deeply insecure, deeply afraid, desperate to be seen or noticed or validated in some way,” he says. “The audience doesn’t necessarily need to know any of that stuff but as an actor, it’s great to give yourself that to draw from.”
As the film progresses, Henry begins to seem less like a straightforward villain and more like a man unravelling — haunted by something he can’t quite explain, which the audience comes to understand is very real. Van Vuuren has his own read on how much of that is supernatural intervention and how much is self-inflicted.
“Personally, I like to think that Henry cursed himself,” he says. “He had an opportunity to find redemption. He’s chosen a different path. He constantly makes the selfish choice.”
Beneath its western, horror and psychological thriller trappings, Adam explains that The Trek is a film about the oldest conflict there is: the fight over land and who gets to belong to it. It’s a story about the inherent arrogance that drives people to attempt to dominate others and the very ground beneath their feet.
Nothing in it offers a clean answer. What it does instead is ask whose story usually gets told and whose doesn’t, which feels like the right question for a film in which the land itself finally gets to speak.