Sea Point Days Airing on Sundance

Posted on October 4, 2010
Monday night on the Sundance Channel catch the ITVS-funded Sea Point Days by filmmaker Francois Verster. The film takes place in the Sea Point Promenade in Cape Town, which was once a bastion of apartheid exclusivity. Today a colorful mix of locals gather at the promenade. Rich, poor, old, young, black, white, Christian, Jew, Muslim, homeless, rent boys, sports players, and petty criminals all meet in this extraordinary public space: one that offers the possibilities of happiness and belonging and gives voice to some of the contradictions of what it means to be South African. Director Francois Verster offered BTB some insight behind the documentary:
“I have tried to use the medium of film itself to give voice more deeply to the contradictions of being South African than I would be able to in a more discursive film or other medium. The film tries, with little direct interference from the director, to use apparently everyday material in a more abstract, indeterminate philosophical meditation, one in which the real is transfigured into something else. It is both far more personal than any other film I have made and one in which meanings are consciously indeterminate, albeit located in a broadly humanist framework.”

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