SA teacher-pupil sex film comes to Windhoek

A controversial film that was the first movie to be banned in post-apartheid South Africa, featuring a sex scene between a schoolteacher and a pupil, is to be screened in Windhoek on January 25. The movie ‘Of Good Report’ was initially banned in South Africa on the basis that it contained child pornography. A South African censorship appeals tribunal has since lifted the ban. The movie is set in a small-town school where a teacher is attracted to young girls and targets a 16-year-old student, who is played by a 23-year-old actress. The movie was banned from screening by the South African Film and Publication Board, but this was later overturned by its appeals tribunal. Legally, the creation, production, possession and distribution of child pornography is a criminal offence. The initial decision to bar the film was slammed as a “rigid and simplistic interpretation of the law” by the Freedom of Expression Institute. Sex between older men and young girls is a major cause of HIV in South Africa, which has the world’s largest population living with Aids - over five million people. AfricAvenir will show the movie at the Goethe Centre in Windhoek. A media statement issued by AfricAvenir called the movie a “hard-hitting and evocative narrative about a schoolteacher, and social misfit, whose illicit affair with one of his pupils spirals into an abyss of obsession and shameful lust that ends in murder”. The curator of the film series ‘African Perspectives’, Hans-Christian Mahnke, said: “I look forward to Windhoek audiences seeing this superb film, this provocative thriller, this adaption and processing of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 ‘Lolita’, in Quentin Tarantino style because of its artistic craft and because it puts cinema from Africa where it belongs, at centre stage.” Entrance is N$30 and the age restriction is 18 years. Viewers are requested to take along their identity cards in case they are asked to present them. The 109-minute film was directed by Jahmil XT Qubeka and produced by Michael Auret and Luzuko Dilima last year. Synopsis Schoolteacher Parker Sithole – played by Mothusi Magano of ‘Tsotsi’ fame - arrives in a rural village with no local connections, but his unassuming disposition inspires trust and sympathy. He promptly begins an illicit affair with one of his new pupils, 16-year-old Nolitha – played by Petronella Tshuma from the soapie ‘Scandal’. It proves to be a disastrous development for both. ‘Of Good Report’ dives into the rarely visited moral worlds of these impoverished communities, burrowing into their dark recesses and exploring their complex social webs. In this forgotten place, a place rife with vice, greed, loneliness, and the fear of sinking further into poverty, a man can get away with anything - including a gruesome murder. Sithole, who by official record and outward behaviour embodies the “good” citizen, grandson, educator and potential husband, is in reality a danger to society. The film grants him neither mercy nor salvation, refraining from drawing into psychological analysis to paint him as a victim. According to AfricAvenir, audiences should be forewarned that the film’s depiction of Sithole’s crimes and their aftermath may disturb some viewers. The movie was first screened at the Durban International Film Festival after it was unbanned in 2013 and received the Artistic Bravery award, a newly created award in honour of Qubeka’s film, at the said festival. It was also the opening film and Winner of Best Film category at the third Africa International Film Festival in Calabar, Nigeria, in the same year. Outside Africa, it was the opening film at the Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles.