It Was Just an Accident
Iranian director Jafar Panahi has spent most of the past decade making films in defiance of the Iranian government’s ban against him. His latest, winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year and nominated for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, is perhaps the director’s most overtly political creation yet. A man and his family are driving on a dark country road one night when they hit a dog and damage their car.
Pulling into a nearby garage the man and his family are assisted but also noticed by a mechanic who hides when he hears the man’s voice and the scrape of his prosthetic leg. The next day, the mechanic follows the man and becomes convinced that he is his former torturer, who tormented him during his detention as a political prisoner.
Seized with the desire for revenge, the mechanic kidnaps the man and finds himself on a journey that will lead him to several similarly released former political prisoners. Panahi guides the story through black farce and tense moral dilemmas in this tightly wound political drama.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated docudrama is a harrowing recreation of the case of six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab. It uses the audio recordings of Rajab’s voice from calls she made to the Red Crescent in January 2024 after the car she was travelling in with her family came under fire from IDF soldiers in Gaza, leaving her the sole survivor. The film focuses on the tension between members of the Red Crescent as they attempt to get an ambulance to her, bringing the audience into the increasingly heated space of the Red Crescent office as they desperately fight against the clock and the IDF.
Orwell: 2+2=5
Director Raoul Peck takes an urgent and timely look at the life and thought of George Orwell, whose masterpiece, 1984, was published in 1949, just six months before Orwell died. He mixes autobiographical material from Orwell’s writings with footage of present-day totalitarian regimes and the parallels between today’s alt-right US politics and the rise of surveillance capitalism. The result is a hard-hitting portrait of a world still living in the shadow of Orwell’s writing while remaining stubbornly ignorant of its warnings.
Laundry
Writer-director Zamo Mkhwanazi’s debut feature draws on her grandfather’s story to create a uniquely empathetic portrait of the psychological realities of black life under apartheid. Set in 1968, the film focuses on Khutala, a young man who wants to pursue music rather than the career his father has in mind for him. But, after his father is arrested, Khutala must step up to take care of the family laundry in the face of the increasing threats from all sides. For Mkhwanazi, apartheid is not just an era indicated by architecture, fashion, music and signage but a system under which any attempts at self-actualisation and improvement are doomed.
Ancestral Visions of the Future
Lesotho-born filmmaker Lemohang Moses returns to the mountains of his homeland for this poetic and visually impressive personal film essay. In a voiceover narrated by Moses, the director reflects on his own family and story. Using haunting surreal imagery to muse on his mother, his first experiences of cinema and his life as an exile now living in Berlin, he crafts a slowly immersive and haunting rumination on the power of the medium and the effects of distance and time on memory.
• The Joburg Film Festival takes place on March 3-8.
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