Rob de Mezieres & Adam Rist
South Africa | 2003 | 72 min
International Premiere
Languages : English, Afrikaans
Subtitles : English, French
The introduction is direct and abrupt: we are in Cape Flats, Cape Town’s huge suburb, marked by poverty, drug trafficking and crime, and controlled by gangsters. It is in this electric context that a rather atypical film crew is attempting to shoot a film on the phenomenon of “bokkies”; kids who, not being prosecutable by the authorities because of their young age, find themselves exploited by gangs to do their dirty work. But, as the project gradually moves along, we realise that everything is intertwined here: reality and fiction, film and life, drama and comedy, black/white and colour, archive images and stolen scenes... It is a punk film both in its approach and in its form: a crazy cinematographical cavalcade under the banner of an audacious liberty that unwittingly transforms into an avant-garde work! A real oddball that has become a cult film: Shooting Bokkie blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction to plunge us into the dangerous yet also extraordinary life of the gangs in the ghettos of the Cape Town region.
Jasmin Basic
