Award-winning South African film-maker and activist Weaam Williams’s most recent work, Two Hues will premiere at the 41st Durban International Film Festival today.
The short film is Williams’s first fiction directorial project and first on-screen acting role, after many years of drama training, performance poetry and live art in the theatre space.
Two Hues is co-directed with Dominique Roxanne Josie, whose work includes “Rooilug” and “Danz”(Kyk-net).
Williams also wrote the screenplay.
Two Hues is a short, psychological drama and an exploration of the artistic nature of a manic depressive. The film delves into the world of the feminine psyche and explores the duality of patriarchy.
Natasa is a bipolar photographer, and a silent rape survivor who lives with her parents. She is pressured by her family to marry and wear a hijab while at work at an advertising agency where women’s bodies are used to sell products.
Natasa only displays her strong, positively energised self at the advertising agency. However, when alone, her deep-seated depression surfaces.
The concept of Two Hues is a visual cinematic treatment style in which the hero’s moods are conveyed with colour - warm and cold, the fiery red/pink manic highs and deep blue lows.
It explores the ambiguous identity of Muslim women living in a Western context and is set in Cape Town.
Natasa’s deep-seated emotional trauma and her silence around it is interconnected to her mental chemical imbalance and emotional see-sawing.
It asks questions around women’s survival and equity, in the workplace and family, within a society deeply patriarchal in its construct.
For more information, vist: https://www.durbanfilmfest.com/film/two-hues/ or https://ccadiff.ukzn.ac.za/two-hues./