Two years of local anticipation culminates in an intimate screening of ‘The White Line’ (2019) at the Multichoice auditorium on a chilly Monday night.
Actress Sunet van Wyk appears when the pre-event wine drinking, social media updating and photo shoots are in full swing and she looks nervous, smiling shyly but resolute.
In half an hour, the small selection of Namibian journalists invited to take a first look at the feature film set to officially premiere at the Durban International Film Festival next week will know why.
Starring as Anna-Marie van der Merwe requires liberal use of the word ‘k*ffir’ which is why Van Wyk almost didn’t take the job.
If she hadn’t, audiences would have missed out on one of ‘The White Line”s best performances.
The sheer and vicious malice that is the Afrikaans housewife who offsets the strength, biting humour, defiance and subversive nature of Girley Jazama’s incredible Sylvia Kamutjemo, an Ovaherero domestic worker who falls in love with Anna-Marie’s brother across the apartheid line in 1963.
Premiering to a standing ovation, ‘The White Line’ ends as a triumph of casting and often of Renier de Bruyn’s cinematography, but does present some issues with editing, while reigniting excitement about local feature films in the wake of such contemporary Namibian gems as ‘Katutura’ (2015) and ‘The Unseen’ (2016).
Written by Micheal Pulse and director Desiree Kahikopo, the film catapults viewers to a time of relative calm and the room-bound desolotion of a widower, played by Muhindua Kaura, after his wife is killed during the Old Location Uprising, the event which saw Namibians revolt after the South African colonial administration enforced apartheid laws and moved the black population to Katutura.
Shot in Otjiherero and Afrikaans with English subtitles, the film sheds light on some of the horrors of the era, during which, for black people, much is forbidden.
Whites-only entrances, being in white suburbs after sunset, travelling without a passbook and interracial sex and marriage.
Enter Jan-Barend Scheepers’ gratingly naïve Pieter de Wet, an Afrikaans policeman who seems to have acquired some kind of soft spot for the natives because his black domestic worker effectively raised him – a reality that persists and speaks to larger issues of white Namibian homes being built on the back of black servitude.
Offering a solid and relatively nuanced white character in contrast to Joalette de Villiers’ Sunet who greets Namibia’s independence with hysterics about a vengeful swart gevaar, Charl Botha’s Jan van der Merwe who loves his awful wife, toes the line and inquires as to Pieter’s sanity when the policeman confesses his love for a black woman and Anna-Marie’s all out hatred sneeringly underscored in her talk about black people being nothing more than cannon fodder in wars, white men’s sex toys and slaves, ‘The White Line’ highlights the fear, privileged apathy, virulent racism and white cowardice which was the order of the day in Namibia under apartheid South Africa’s rule.
While scenes in which Sylvia is forcibly removed from white shops, harassed by a policeman for being in a white suburb after dark, beaten and incarcerated without trial because a white women said (lied) she stole from her are blood boiling, ‘The White Line”s central love story is elevated by strong retro set and costume design adding authenticity to a film that could have done with a tad more Namibia-specific context.
Particularly for a film vying for international audiences whose only measure of apartheid is South Africa.
Predictability of plot, the staggering folly and, dare I say, implausibility of Jan’s actions in the name of a love nurtured through stolen moments under trees as Sylvia works and via hidden letters aside, ‘The White Line’ wins in its brilliant cast, which includes Vanessa Kamatoto, Mervin ‘Cheez’ Uahupirapi and Desmond Katamila, who uplift a story bound to stir local and international audiences.
Apartheid in Namibia?
No doubt, there will be Google searches. There will be conversation and, as ‘The White Line’ premieres in South Africa, hopefully, there will be kinship and catharsis found in the witnessing of shared history set to the sounds of Micheal Pulse, One Blood and original Namibian music.
Darkly funny in parts with scenes by Jazama decrying white spinelessness, indifference and the tragedy of Sylvia’s life while providing the film’s devastating emotional core, ‘The White Line’ succeeds in adding remarkable historical fiction to the Namibian feature film archive in its story of love and betrayal emphasising the precarious nature of black lives surviving the whims of apartheid’s white supremacy.
