Filmmaker Spotlight

Directors Statement

This year, Cape Town International Airport welcomed over one million visitors over the gorgeous summer holiday period — its record thus far. When tourism pumps life into a dependent economy in this way, packing beaches and malls and restaurants and promenades and Ubers — it becomes painfully easy for the rich and upper-middles to conveniently ignore that over a third of the nation is unemployed. App drivers looking to breathe for the rest of the year take advantage of surges like this by putting themselves at risk, some driving twelve to sixteen hours a day, others working their cars as a second job, taking the nightshift to carry inebriated club goers and service industry workers around town, across highways, along the sea side, straining to stay awake. To stay alive.

Such is Toni’s world in DREAD. A rotation of chatty/sandy/friendly/worldly/sickly/lonely/eerie passengers who blur together, each with their own life, their own problems, taking up in Toni’s private and even sentimental moving space for fleeting moments — slices of life — before carrying on, Toni rinsing the car of each between each. But in this capitalist carousel, myriad things can be said or left unsaid, and not all can be so easily cleansed…

Cape Town is a city run on binaries. Black and White. Haves and have nots. Visible and invisible. As two Capetonian filmmakers of very different mixed race and nonbinary experience, we use our work to bring the fickle nature of these violent binaries to light. Dread is a story about a transmasculine person of colour trying to survive a city where their peace and spirituality is directly threatened by modern day colonisation in the forms of gentrification, irresponsible tourism, and cultural appropriation.

For many queer people, and particularly queer people of colour, often the safest one can feel in oppressive cities like Cape Town is in the private company of lovers and chosen family. In Dread - as in all our work - we set out to portray queer love as a gift of support and refuge from a cruel world - a holy water in the face of evil.

Inspired tonally by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and thematically by Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, but with the suspenseful modern edge of Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, Dread is a character portrait that drops two down-on-their luck lovers into a paranormal thriller plot borne of economic isolation in the socio-political world of a hostile hotspot city.