SA film selected for international film festival
Like SA, The Wait reveals the “sense of powerlessness and hope” that exist together at all times…
A South African film, The Wait, has been selected for the prestigious Red Sea International Film Festival.
The heart-breaking SA social drama by award-winning director Imran Hamdulay will play in competition in the 2023 International Short Films category at the film festival in Saudi Arabia.
The Wait sees Mzu enter a Cape Town police station and discover Fareed, a pensioner who is confused and has been waiting in the queue for even longer than those ahead of him. “The station is busy and chaotic, so Mzu takes it upon himself to see that Fareed is helped…”
According to the film’s production notes, “The Wait is an allegory of South Africa’s complex society, where a sense of powerlessness and hope exist together at all times.”
Of The Wait, Hamdulay says:
“I felt compelled to write this story after experiencing a similar incident at a police station when waiting to report a crime. I once heard someone say that South Africans are a wise & patient people. I like that. But with patience comes a lot of waiting. Waiting for poverty to be eradicated. For equal opportunity. Waiting for a severe imbalance in society to be rectified. And like Mzu, I also feel angry that we are still waiting. This film was a way for me to be introspective about why it is we find ourselves in this sort of post apartheid limbo.
“Through Mzu’s experience, I want to explore the themes of privilege, race, opportunity in a post-apartheid democracy. I see this film as a sort of allegory of where we are as South Africans. I’m interested in the moment we find ourselves in. As a nation I feel we’re kind of powerless. I was raised in a family of activists and this means that the idea of patience is inherently one of hope.
“I don’t know what that looks like for us as a country, but I am hopeful that however glacial our progress, we will one day see a fair and just society in South Africa because we have been through far worse and have come out the other end fighting.”
Hamdulay is a writer, director and producer, based in Cape Town. His films have been selected for many film festivals around the world, and he’s won several awards including the Durban International Film Festival Best SA Feature Film award in 2021, for ‘Sons of the Sea’.
The Wait, which is produced by Khosie Dal, will be competing with 13 other films during the Festival -which runs from 30 November to 9 December – in Jeddah.