There’s something to be said about how films that are honest to themselves and the story they’re trying to tell always find their audience, the resonance transcending local and global borders. They need not proclaim anything; they simply arrive.
Since its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival last year, where it won the Panorama Ecumenical Jury Prize, Imran Hamdulay’s debut feature, The Heart is a Muscle, has travelled widely in the film festival circuit.
After screenings at the Sydney Film Festival and New York African Film Festival, the film returned to South Africa to secure Best Feature Film at the 2025 kykNET Silwerskermfees alongside a well-received local theatrical run.
It was also selected as the country’s official submission for the Academy Awards, a milestone that Hamdulay finds amazing and humbling, especially since he had set out to make “a very South African film and never really thought about how the inter-national audiences might respond to it”.
Now, Hamdulay returns with another family drama that continues to look at the lives of families, fathers and sons and how these relationships shape our experiences.
Told through the perspective of two young brothers, Pieces is a film that follows a family at a moment of change as their mother prepares to remarry and leave the home in which they were raised. As the boys begin to understand the father they lost in different ways, the film explores childhood and memory and what we inherit from the people we love.
“Pieces is a simple story about two boys trying to understand their father, their family and the world that is changing around them,” says Hamdulay.
“It’s a film about loss but loss can also be funny and warm and clumsy and awkward, sometimes all at the same time. I want the film to have all of those things in it and to feel alive rather than simply sad.”
Hamdulay understands the importance of a story like this enough not to overstate its urgency, especially when we discuss how vital the conversation of boys becoming men and their relationships with fathers is. We have seen it in films like My Father’s Shadow, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and even The Heart is a Muscle.
He expounds on his interests in these stories and how he isn’t really setting out to explore or subvert particular themes.
“These are just the things I find myself interested in right now: boys becoming men, fathers and sons, parents and children, what we inherit from the people who came before us and how we understand the people we’ve lost.
“Maybe that has something to do with where I am in my own life and the fact that I’m becoming a father soon.” It is interesting how we don’t set out to send a message with our art, and yet the audience always finds it.
“The Heart is a Muscle explored some of these ideas through the experience of a father and now Pieces looks at them through the eyes of sons. I like that there’s almost a mirroring happening between the two films, even though they’re very different.”
This is the mindset he refers to as the realisation that has transformed the film from what it was years ago, needing to return to it as a different person and a different writer.
On casting, Hamdulay explains that Pieces is a story about a mother and her two sons, so getting that family right was important. They cast far and wide for the boys and found two immensely talented kids: Tazwell Sprogter and Asher Jacobs. “Having Kim Engelbrecht play their mother has been really special. She’s an incredible actor and brings so much warmth and depth to Salma. Then there’s Keenan Arrison, who I love working with, and Cedwyn Joel, who brings this wonderful quiet presence to the film. I feel very lucky to have them, alongside so many other brilliant South African actors.” The writer-director’s love for actors and the collaborative nature of making a film is one to behold.
“There’s something actors bring that you can’t manufacture or plan for. Watching them make that magic happen is still one of my favourite parts of making films.” This is especially echoed in his experience with working with young Sprogter and Jacobs and how people often talk about working with children as a challenge.
“It was one of the great pleasures of making this film. I really enjoy working with kids. Of course, there’s an unpredictability to it and you have to give up a certain amount of control, but that’s also where something magical can happen. You create a space for them to play and be themselves and suddenly they give you something you could never have planned.” Lovers of Imran Hamdulay’s work can expect a writer and director who’s grown and changed in Pieces, one who is a little more comfortable with himself as a filmmaker and less interested in proving anything. A writer who understood that “making a film takes a long time and takes a lot out of you” and resisted the idea of having to make a film just for the sake of it in hopes to chase after the success of his debut feature.
“A film still has to have integrity and I have to feel connected to it. Pieces felt like that film.”
With Pieces, he wanted to give himself more room to play, making his sophomore film visually ambitious.
“It’s a slightly bigger film than The Heart is a Muscle. We had opportunities to try things that I maybe didn’t have the resources or experience to try before, challenging myself to do things I haven’t done before. There are still long takes, natural light and a fairly restrained camera but there are also more formal things that I wanted to play around with.”
Hamdulay also adds that he’s realised more and more that filmmaking is a collaborative process, relying on the wonderful family that forms around a film - the producers, actors, the crew.
“These are the people you trust creatively,” he says. “They’re really a huge part of what allows you to be a filmmaker in the first place.”
The crew consists of a team of very skilled practitioners with proven records, including editor Paul Speirs, production designer Tirath Bhoola, as well as producers Adam Thal and Casey Diepeveen, with Pierre de Villiers as the director of photography. Together, the group has worked on productions like Black Burns Fast, The Last Ranger and This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.
Principal photography has begun on Pieces, with filming under way on location in Cape Town and surrounding areas, scheduled to wrap in November.
The film is set to premiere in 2027 and has secured South African distribution through Indigenous Film Distribution and Development. It is the first in a slate of five microbudget films funded by the National Film and Video Foundation.
With Pieces, Imran Hamdulay hopes that people will get to see something of their own families in the story and the characters, inspiring one thought, if any, as they sit in that theatre and on the ride back home: “to want to go and spend some time with the people they love.”