Accession

A deeply unsettling portrait of a disturbed figure in this minimalist and socially committed film that marks director Rix as one of South African cinema’s finest young talents.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.

 


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  • Director-Screenwriter Michael J Rix
  • Producer Anita Callander, Michael J Rix
  • With Pethro Themba Mbole, Vusumuzi Ndumo, Nomsa Msiza
  • South Africa 2012
  • 78 mins
  • Production company Mirror Mountain Pictures

A deeply shocking but masterfully accomplished film that follows the lengths to which an HIV-positive man will go in order to try and cure himself of the virus. John is an unemployed twenty-something hoodlum who lives alone in a nondescript shack in the small South African town of Duduza. The hand-held camera stays with John (unflinchingly played by Pethro Themba Mbole) as he stops and chats with his friends, and shares beers and street food with them. But he also indulges in unprotected, passionless sex several times in his shack or around the fields nearby with any of the local girls he meets. He later finds out that one of these women is HIV-positive. When a friend tells him that sex with a virgin is an instant cure, John follows that option; and the nightmare begins.

Keith Shiri