Born frees need love too

Published Sep 25, 2015

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Helen Herimbi

“No one really looks at someone until something happens,” muses a character from Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s first feature film, Necktie Youth, which opens in South African cinemas tomorrow. The film takes a look at a section of society that has been spoken for, but never had its own voice until now.

The setting is the opulence of Joburg’s Sandton suburb and it takes us into the heart of a crew of born frees who struggle to reconcile the privilege they were born into with the identity crisis facing them in a democratic South Africa. It stars Bonko Cosmo as Jabs, the son of nouveau riche parents, and Shongwe-La Mer as his best friend, September. It’s through them that the audience is given a view of what it’s like to be young, rich and black. And sad.

Shot in black and white save for some flashback memories of 1995, the film starts with Emily (Kelly Bates) mounting a ladder, making a noose out of a skipping rope and hanging herself from a tree in her mother’s garden while a camera records her. The suicide goes viral and a few of the youngsters she is supposed to have known are interviewed about it for a film within the film. Except, most of them seem to not know Emily. To not have really looked at her until this happened.

This 2015 Tribeca Film Festival selection also scooped the Best Domestic Film and Best Director awards at this year’s Durban International Film Festival (DIFF). Having dropped out of high school, Shongwe-La Mer says he feels validated: “For me, DIFF means something to me as a kid who has no formal education and has been very much rejected by the South African film industry. I started writing what would be Necktie Youth at 14 and went to many production companies and everyone told me this is a ridiculous film, go to film school. People wouldn’t give me an internship because they said they give them to someone with a masters from Afda. I was told I didn’t have anything worth saying and I need to play it their way. So the awards were amazing for that reason. It was being validated, for this year at least, as the best in my domestic peers.”

While it has been compared to Larry Clark’s Kids, and polarised critics locally and abroad, Necktie Youth is an interesting look at one person’s account of the world they were born into. Emily is inspired by the director’s girlfriend who committed suicide in her early teens.

I meet Shongwe-La Mer at his parents’ house and for the most part, the eccentric 24-year-old is pleasant if sometimes rambling, but you sense that he’s strategically in control of what and just how much he reveals. But when I ask him how he decided how much of his personal story to reveal in the film, knowing that it would mean also revealing other people’s private business, he seems uncomfortable.

“It’s a very intense commitment to put yourself out there like that because it impacts more people than just you,” he explains.

“There’s a responsibility to those people’s families because I’m portraying something so dark, but so personal. You end up being like, man, it’s going to have to be so honest because it’s going to hurt them so much and it needed to hurt them. So there were a lot of responsibilities that were extremely hard to take.”

Shongwe-La Mer believes his film doesn’t have a solution as to why so many kids who grow up like him go on to kill themselves. “In Necktie, I didn’t want to propose an answer,” he says. “It would’ve been presumptuous to give solutions because if there was a solution and I had the answers, I shouldn’t be making a movie. I should be involved in public health or something.”

He admits that it may be a cliché, but the world as we know it now with the constant need to be validated thanks to the popularity of social media, needs more love. “That’s why I have Jabs and September and everyone is so busy trying to be cool or liked or hip or have the most followers that they’re unable to say that I’m riding with my best friend and he’s breaking down so maybe let’s have a human conversation. The main message of the movie is society is damned if we’re not able to talk, to empathise.”

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