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Gritty and uplifting South African movie Four Corners screens nationwide from 28 March --
Wed, 26 Mar 2014 09:58
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Director Ian Gabriel s film, Four Corners, releases nationwide in South African cinemas on 28 March, and tells the story of a young chess prodigy who must defy the odds and stay one move in a game where winning or losing can mean the difference between life and death .
The film, which is set in the Cape Flats, home to the notorious Number Gang factions of the Western Cape, was South Africas Official Selection for Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards and an International Press Academy 2014 Satellite Award Nominee for Best International Film.
Giant Films and Moonlighting Films in association with the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa and The National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa present Four Corners to local audiences.
Ian Gabriel
Director
Strength of family was a starting point and inspiration for this film. Having experienced both bonding and loss as a child, I discovered late in life that my father had twice experienced loss of family, a history that was covered up to protect later generations. This piqued my strong passion for the notion of family as a great binder but also as the impenetrable custodian of losses and pains that can remain forever hidden from view.
From this personal passion I hoped to evolve a film about family lost and family regained, and to show it from many shifting perspectives, especially from the point of view of a young boy, because I know that story. I wanted to make a film that dealt with these trials and conflicts, the desire for family, and the absence of family, and the desire to reform and make things whole within the context of gangsterism, Gabriel says.
I wanted to look at how difficult it might be for a father, a gangster, to turn the clock back and set things right. I planned to set the film in the particular world of the Cape Flats where the chances are very high that a boy will grow up in a single parent or no parent fatherless home. I hoped to portray a gangster film in a largely unknown world. And reveal it in a fresh way, the director continues.
Redemptive story
According to Gabriel, this was the process when he met Hofmeyr Scholtz to discuss writing the project. I explained that I wanted to tell a redemptive story about family about a father, about a son, about a cop who is watching family and young children threatened, and life eroded from outside.
The creative process was organic, at a later stage we added a daughter who had lost her father from before he died. We decided she should be an outsider returned who knows and reacts against the tough landscape of her youth that she had wanted to escape from, yet feels its roots pulling her back a common sensation that South Africans and Africans in exile experience.
Gabriel and Scholtz developed a surrogate father that a boy in need of a father might find. So there we had it four corners, four lives and sounding boards influencing one boy s life, reflecting the Four Corners of a chessboard and the Four Corners of a prison cell (literally die Vier Hoeke in Sabela prison slang). And each of these simple stories connected with the next to make up the Four Corners in the chessboard of Ricardos life, adds Gabriel.
Just a few kilometres from where Gabriel lives in Cape Town is the unique world of the Cape Flats where gangsterism is rife and where a boy like Ricardo, the hero of the story, might be drawn by the power and prestige of the gangs.
Truthful portrayal
In this world I knew actors would be able to find a special connection to their characters if we were able to absolutely truthfully portray the world that the characters inhabited, without resorting to complex themes or a predictable view of the power of the gangs, continues Gabriel.
The world of the Cape Flats is so unique and such a different world that I knew the more we told the more we would need to tell, he says. It wasnt only with the actors that I wanted to achieve the sense of being in the moment I wanted that from the audience as well if that was possible, so that when finally there is a chase or there is a gun fight, which are staples of the gangster film genre.
I wanted people to really feel and be in those moments and experience them, just as the community of families in the Cape Flats experience gangster turf outbursts from day to day on the streets, school-fields, playgrounds and block yards which are the chosen battlegrounds .
Gabriel comments that they wanted the performances and the reality of the story to be immediate, spontaneous and visceral, to blur the boundary between real life and film.
So we looked both among actors and also non-actors who had intense experience of life in the Flats. We found in rehearsal that the actors learnt from the non-actors just as much as the non-actors learned from the actors. We shot the film in communities where fighting for turf and turf war is a daily reality. Sometimes we cast ex-gangsters, ex-prisoners, kids from tough neighbourhoods like Belhar where there s an intense gang war, who know first-hand what this story is really about.
Special world of the Cape Flats
He continues: I hope to leave the audience with an experience that will stay with them after they leave the cinema. If they remember that this special world of the Cape Flats exists and is not only more dangerous, but also much richer than they knew, that will be very satisfying for us as filmmakers and for the communities and families we worked with.
No matter the danger, no matter the pain, no matter the emotional drain, if you were to decide to claim or reclaim your home and your family in the middle of a turf war, because it was the only family you ever hoped for, you would likely do what
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