The South African drama Moffie had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, where it’s also nominated for this year’s Queer Lion Award.

The film was directed by Oliver Hermanus, and is based on the groundbreaking novel with the same name by André-Carl van der Merwe.

So far it has been met with rave reviews.

ScreenDaily wrote that the “South African drama Moffie is an altogether intense experience that often feels as punishing for the viewer as it is for the characters”.

Variety notes that “Moffie achieves some hard grace in under two hours: Never has the titular slur borne such beauty”.

The Guardian gave the film four out of five stars, which is some pretty healthy praise.

Before we delve into the highlights of The Guardian’s review, here’s the trailer:

I’ll definitely be giving that a watch when it comes to our screens.

More on the film:

Moffie, screening in the Orizzonti sidebar at Venice, is a tense, stealthy rites-of-passage drama from the dog days of South Africa’s apartheid regime, a tale of callow young conscripts inside a corroded old system. Set in 1981 during the country’s border conflict with communist-backed Angola, Oliver Hermanus’s film manages an unflinching portrait of a society in spasm; paranoid and brutish and largely screaming at itself. It’s a war story of sorts in which the battle has already been lost.

Kai Luke Brummer gives a fine performance as Nicholas, a willowy 18-year-old at a sun-blasted army boot-camp. Nick and his fellow soldiers are supposed to be fighting the enemy, but the only action they’re seeing is on the volleyball court, or the dorm, or sometimes in the toilet cubicle, much to the sergeant’s horror. The way the officers see it, the very worst thing a soldier can be is a “moffie”, an Afrikaans insult that the subtitles translate as “f*****”. “Moffie!” they scream – as though they regard homosexuality as a mad dog that has somehow got under the fence, or an invading swarm of wasps, liable to sting any man who isn’t properly covered up.

Hermanus (above) was initially not keen to make a film about South Africa’s white minority.

But he was swayed by the power of Andre-Carl van der Merwe’s memoir (Moffie’s source material) and by an unexpected sense of kinship with the desperate duo at its centre. Without ever glossing over South Africa’s culture of institutionalised racism, Hermanus suggests that its rampant homophobia is creating its share of casualties too.

You can read the rest of the review here.

I’ll leave you with the closing lines:

Moffie is measured, remorseless; it crawls right under your skin. By the time these virgin soldiers are removed from the barracks, sent into the rushes where the enemy lies in wait, it almost comes as a sweet relief.

Compelling stuff.

[source:guardian]