Sleeper’s Wake

This directorial debut feature boasts an exemplary cast and an unsettling quality.

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 Barry Berk
  • Producer Ken Kaplan
  • With Lionel Newton, Jay Anstey, Deon Lotz
  • South Africa 2012
  • 94 mins
  • Production company Bioskope Pictures

This very skilful debut feature exploring grief and healing is set in an eerie and remote South African coastal area. John Wraith is in his mid-forties and is regaining consciousness in hospital. With a fresh big scar across his face, he looks more than a little stupefied by drugs and amnesia. Learning that his wife and daughter have died in a car accident because he fell asleep at the wheel, and troubled by guilt, he retreats to an isolated coastal village to recuperate. Here he meets Jackie, a vulnerable teenage girl who, with her father and brother, is also traumatised by loss. Jackie is struggling to come to terms with the murder of her mother after a violent robbery. The teenager manipulatively seduces John, but hitherto her devout father has kept a tight control over his children, and this is a dangerous liaison consummated with devastating consequences.
Keith Shiri

Director statement

Sleeper’s Wake is adapted from the award-winning novel by Alistair Morgan, a chilling, suspenseful work that explores grief and healing in contemporary South Africa. What intrigued me about adapting the book was the chance to explore what happens to us when our realities are threatened and shattered; what our psyches are capable of when normality is transformed into chaos; what we’ll do to survive the loss of a loved one. John Wraith is a 46-year-old man who has survived a motorcar accident in which his wife and child both died while he was driving. He seeks solitude in a coastal town, but there he is drawn into the complex emotional orbit of Jackie, a self-destructive, 17-year-old girl reeling after witnessing her mother’s murder. John knows that the relationship is dangerous, fraught with moral and emotional pitfalls, but there is a need for him to heal which is greater than his morality and the threat of her over-protective, religious father. The miracle of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy is well-known but hasn’t curtailed the prevalence of very violent crime in our society. Is it a symptom of a short-circuited healing process? Is there some necessary darkness that we still need to endure? Can there only be healing after some cataclysmic event forces us to confront our base, animal natures? These are questions that the film tangentially poses but never seeks to answer didactically.
Barry Berk

Director biography

A writer-director who initially studied acting at the University of Cape Town’s Drama Department, after which he spent two years acting on the stage. From 1990 to 1993 he studied film at New York University’s Graduate Film Programme, and he has largely worked in prime-time South African television since, picking up several awards for his dramatic work. In 1996 he directed Angel for MNet’s New Directions Series. At the South African Avanti Television and Video Awards, he won the Best Director of the Year Award. In 2000 he wrote and co-directed the series Yizo Yizo, and two years later wrote and directed Gaz ‘Lam, a 13-part drama series for SABC1. In 2005-2006 he head-wrote and directed the majority of The Lab, a 13 x one-hour drama series that garnered 19 nominations at the South African Film and Television Awards. He was recently selected as the first South African director to work on the British hit series, Wild at Heart (2011). With Sleeper’s Wake, he makes his feature directorial debut.

Filmography

2012 Sleeper's Wake