The Hilton Arts Festival in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands has, over the course of three decades, developed from a niche event into one of SA’s key annual arts platforms. It takes place from August 11-13, with a broad offering of theatre, music, visual arts, film, workshops, markets and more.
My eye was immediately drawn to some familiar names on the programme — although the pleasure of a festival also lies in seeing shows you don’t know anything about, and discovering new favourites. Sadly I won’t be in Hilton to enjoy the live productions, but I have had the opportunity to watch the films that will be screened this year. One of these is the 2023 release Beyond the Light Barrier, a documentary produced and directed by Uga Carlini.
The film tackles the curious case of Elizabeth Klarer, who achieved modest local and international fame for her claims about extraterrestrial encounters. This campaign started in the 1950s and reached its peak after the publication of her “autobiography” (a book from which the film takes its title) in 1980. Klarer insisted that she was impregnated by a humanoid alien called Akon, with whom she travelled to the planet Meton in Alpha Centauri.
Carlini adopts an ambiguous approach to her subject. At first, Beyond the Light Barrier seems to fall into tinfoil-hattery. The earnest exploration of Klarer’s story, more or less as she had presented it, might at moments make viewers worry that they are watching an extended episode of Carte Blanche in the days when it dabbled with the populist paranormal.
This tone is at odds, however, with the quirky soundtrack composed by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, with its synthesised mock-UFO motifs, and the similarly anachronistic style of various interspersed animations and cartoon illustrations. These atmospheric throwbacks to the post-World War 2 heyday of alien sightings work against the apparent journalistic attempt to establish the veracity of Klarer’s narrative.
The Hilton Festival is an apt springboard for the film: Klarer’s is very much a KwaZulu-Natal tale, in which the Drakensberg landscape features prominently. And Beyond the Light Barrier is populated by interviewees who can only be described, in the words of a friend of mine who lives in the area, as “instantly recognisable Midlands types”.
Happily, there are enough sceptical voices included for the rational viewer not to be left tearing his or her hair out. Despite Klarer’s renown, even while she was alive the consensus among Ufologists was that her accounts lacked consistency and couldn’t be true; in the archive footage to which Carlini regularly has recourse, Klarer speaks clearly and confidently but really does seem like she’s making it up as she goes along.
Having more or less exhausted its ostensible premise, the film ceases to be about aliens. Instead, it pursues the more credible side of Klarer’s message. This is a vision that is anti-warfare, anti-nuclear (including a bizarre Chernobyl/Ukrainian detour), anti-fossil fuel, pro-vegan. The utopia that Akon and his supposed fellow-Mekonians inhabit becomes a pacifist and environmentalist credo.
Here, the wisest observation comes from Paul Slabolepszy — who, it turns out, has written a play inspired by Klarer’s enigmatic life: Finding Rosetta, a one-woman show starring Annie Robinson-Grealy that will be performed twice at this year’s festival. Slabolepszy says simply “she lied her truth”.
Yet if one is tempted to suggest that Klarer was ahead of her time and place, towards the end of the film we are reminded that she was very much a product of both. She used Akon’s voice to give vent to crass racism, criticising white people for encouraging the advancement of “vast masses of black and brown people” and enabling their “wanton freedom”. Klarer-Akon asserted the benefits of strict racial segregation.
Carlini attempts to find some redemption for her subject by enlisting John Kani as a narrator who also acts as a benevolent black authority conveying absolution. Credo Mutwa makes a few appearances, too, repositioning Klarer’s fantasies within an African cosmology.
Ultimately, however, despite her interstellar aspirations, Klarer was bound to and by apartheid SA. As scholars such as Nicky Falkof have shown, neurotic and claustrophobic societies tend to produce “moral panic” and conspiracy theories — and this is the mundane truth of Beyond the Light Barrier.
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