The Heart Is a Muscle, which opened in Berlin last year and was selected as South Africa’s official entry into the international feature Oscar race, returns to South Africa this week to screen out of competition at the Joburg Film Festival before hitting theaters nationally on March 6.
The film was written and directed by debut director Imran Hamdoulieh and produced by Hamdouliai, Bret Michael Innes, Kosi Dali, Lesley-Ann Brandt, and Adam Tarr. Starring Keiynan Allison and Melissa de Vries, and co-starring Lauren Lobser, Dean Marais, Ryder Adams, Danny Ross, Troy Pauls and Lincoln Van Wyk, the film is being shown worldwide by MMM Film Sales.
The story begins with a scene that hits every parent’s biggest fear: a five-year-old child running away from a family birthday party. A frantic search for the boy ensues, and when he emerges unharmed several hours later, he playfully assumes it was all a hide-and-seek game and is angrily criticized by his father Ryan, played by Alison. His violent reaction shocks both Ryan and the other partygoers, setting off a chain of events that forces Ryan to reflect on his past and make peace with his own buried trauma.
Inspired by similar events in Hamdouley’s own life, “The Heart Is a Muscle” is a moving exploration of fatherhood, intergenerational trauma, and healing. The director has said that the film was inspired by his own journey into adulthood.
Hamdoulieh, the son of a prominent anti-apartheid activist who is now considering starting his own family, said the film took shape as he thought more and more about “the things my father passed on to me and how I live with them and overcome them as a father.”
“When I thought about the generational gap, I kept coming back to the word trauma. It’s something that didn’t sit with me in a constructive way. It always felt like a burden,” Hamdoulieh told Variety.
“I really feel that what I also received from his legacy and the memories he passed on was a lot of healing and a lot of strength. I wanted to speak to myself in a way that was intergenerational and healing. What does that mean?”
“The Heart Is a Muscle” is set in the Cape Flats, a suburb of Cape Town. The area is primarily made up of black and colored communities resettled during the apartheid era. Racism and the forced violence of forced migration left a painful legacy of poverty, crime and gang violence, but Hamdoulieh said he was keen to rewrite that narrative, especially with the recent proliferation of gang-related crime dramas based on the Cape Flats.
“I’m from this area. These are the people I know. This is the community I know,” he said. “And there has always been a deep frustration with the lack of nuance and complexity afforded not just to space, but to history, heritage, color, texture, and more importantly people.”
Since its debut in the Panorama category at last year’s Berlinale, where it won the Ecumenical Jury Prize, The Heart Is a Muscle has enjoyed a healthy run at festivals, most recently playing in Santa Barbara, but Hamdouley insists that “without a doubt, the most rewarding and moving experience for me has been showing it in the community where it was made.”
“I was watching a community on screen with the complexities of themselves and the people around them,” he said. “It was really rewarding in a very beautiful way.”
The director’s next film, scheduled to begin production later this year, will be an adventure story centered around four children who “run around the neighborhood causing mischief,” he said, with a Cape Flats spin on films such as “The Goonies” and “Where the Wild Things Are.”
“I want young teenagers to see the movie, so they can see themselves on the screen and say, ‘Oh, really? I want to make a movie someday,'” he said. “There’s power in seeing yourself on screen.”
The Joburg Film Festival runs from 3rd to 8th March.
