‘There’s something wrong…with your love’ | CAFF opens with a bold and intimate film from South Africa about the conspiracy of love

By Caitlin Pearson

@pearanson

The 14^th Cambridge African Film Festival presents ‘Love The One You Love’ – winner of three awards at the 35^th Durban International Film Festival in 2014: Best South African Feature Film, Best Direction of a South African Feature Film (Jenna Cato Bass) & Best Actress (to Chi Mhende). Part of the ‘From Africa, with Love’ series.

Sandile loves Terri. Terri loves Sandile, but can’t say the words. They go out dancing, they watch movies, they pose for cheesey photos in front of a beautiful Cape Town sea view. Sandile and Terri’s love is all involving, neon-lit and playful. But even as a picture of their happy relationship is painted in these first scenes, you start to feel like there’s something not quite right…
Meanwhile on another side of the city, Eugene is hanging out with Mo, the little brother of his ex-girlfriend. They shoot pool while the teenage Mo expounds on the mysteries of women and dating. He just wants a buddy, but Euguene has a plan to get back together with Mo’s sister. His longing for this old relationship is poignant, relatable, and obsessive, and Louw Venter’s performance of the character is as much sympathetic as it is disconcerting.

‘Love The One You Love’ is set in a city often described as a ‘bubble’, although one that manages to contain within it many different worlds. Through this unconventional love story, different parts of these worlds appear, giving a sense of place, people and atmosphere that feels grounded in real life. Sandile and Terri’s relationship plays out in the intimate space of her colourful apartment, covered in plastic toys and trinkets. But the bubble of their relationship also draws in many other characters from the city: a sangoma, a hypnotist, a pastor, a taxi driver and even a private detective. Along with the audience, all are invited to grapple with the uncertainty, or conspiracy (?) of Sandile and Terri’s love.

This is the first feature from director Jenna Cato Bass. Fed-up with waiting for financing to come through, she went ahead and made the film on a nano-budget, using two handheld cameras to capture some remarkable improvised performances, up close and personal. Standing over their shoulders and peering in to their lives, you feel like you are really there in the room with them: touching the cold porcelain of a figurine, feeling the bite of the city’s wind at your neck. Bass puts you slap-bang in the middle of the Sandile and Terri’s relationship, at the heart of its paradoxical warmth, confrontation, excitement and emptiness.

As the plot develops, bizarre occurrences and magical lurid scenes from another world punctuate the narrative, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. The film seems to be asking something universal, but also specifically South African: how do we think and act in this gulf between the expectations we have - of happiness, success, truth, equality - and the reality we live? Drawing together honest storytelling, playful cinematography and compelling performances, Bass conjures up a world both familiar and bizarre.
Bold and original, ‘Love The One You Love’ is the perfect opener to the 14^thCambridge African Film Festival, signalling a new wave of South African filmmaking with its own distinctive aesthetic.

We hope the film will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker, Jenna Cato Bass (via Skype), led by Dr Lindiwe Dovey (SOAS, University of London).

This film is part of a love-themed African film series called ‘From Africa, with Love’, in a collaboration between the five African film festivals in the UK: Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival in Scotland, Film Africa in London, Afrika Eye in Bristol, Watch-Africa in Wales, and the Cambridge African Film Festival (CAFF), in association with the BFI UK Audience Network’s LOVE Blockbuster Season.

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