This extraordinary film, proclaimed as "not for sissies" by the South African Sunday Times, was made by Michael Raeburn in Triomf, a suburb of Johannesburg where poor white Afrikaaners live shoulder to shoulder with equally poverty-stricken blacks. You could call it super-realist — except that its characters break into a kind of rough-hewn, freeform poetry on occasions.
Made in Afrikaans and set on the day of the first free elections in 1994, it concentrates on a family who reflect the stresses of changing times. Pop is a railway pensioner, his wife sells flowers and Lambert, their son, who is about to celebrate his 21st birthday, is a slow-witted youth prone to violent rages. The central character is the alcoholic Uncle Treppie, who finds a black prostitute for the boy as a birthday present but hopes the liaison might just get him out of his life altogether.
The action makes the hillbillies in Deliverance look like milk and water as it progresses towards something like tragedy. But it also contains a fair amount of pawky humour too. It makes an memorable coda to the Afrikaans cinema that once held sway in South Africa.
Triomf
Cert: 15
