that hasn’t already been said? Lauded South African film maker Oliver Hermanus’ new film has been praised by every critic who’s watched it as audacious film making, powerful in showing homophobia, toxic masculinity and the oppressive tactics of the apartheid-era state. And all the praise is earned. In typical Hermanus fashion, it slices to the bone and you’ll emerge from the cinema rattled and with your head buzzing.
I have often said that Hermanus’ 2011 film Skoonheid is the best South African film ever made. It’s a piece of cinema so local yet so far reaching, so bleak yet incisive, so illuminating of the Afrikaans male condition that I haven’t stopped thinking about it in the nine years since I saw it.
These were deep apartheid-era years, a time when the SA Defence Force was vicious and ludicrous enough to submit men it deemed gay to a medical torture programme it called The Aversion Project to “cure” them. This involved exposing them to images of men and shocking them if they showed physical arousal. In the cases where this failed, they put patients through a sex change operation.
A recent video series by Jacaranda FM asked gay Afrikaans public figures, including Armand Aucamp, Casper de Vries, Pieter Dirk-Uys and Rian van Heerden, to talk about their own experiences with the word ‘moffie’. Translated into English as faggot, the men recounted the shame, the confusion and the anger of being slandered by this term. What resonates is that these words – and Nguni words such as ‘isitabane’ – have in no way disappeared.
Ultimately, the film shows the impact of autocratic regimes on the individual and the far-reaching consequences of that. Moffie is another powerful addition to the Hermanus canon, and I can’t wait to see what this film maker will do next.
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