EUROPEAN FILM FESTIVAL: Aqui (Portugal)

The 13th European Film Festival South Africa is here. Over 10 days across 4 cities, audiences will have the opportunity to see some of the best films in current European cinema, fresh from Cannes, Venice, Berlin and beyond. Featuring award-winning films by giants of European cinema alongside bold new voices and starring Europe’s biggest names: this year's films follow families of all kinds — biological, chosen, broken, rebuilding — fighting to hold together and carve out a future against everything working to pull them apart.

ALL FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS WILL BE SCREENED WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.

SEE THE FULL BIOSCOPE PROGRAM HERE

Aqui (Portugal)

Directed by: Tiago Guedes. Drama. 3hrs 24mins. (There will be an intermission)

Director Tiago Guedes’ ambitious, epic and suitably enigmatic adaptation of the Jesus trilogy of novels by South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee stays true to its source material’s humanist hopes, despairs and probing of the eternal philosophical questions that keep families and societies eternally and anxiously moving onward.

Guedes’ cinematic vision of Coetzee’s stark, allegorical world and fidelity to the author’s spare language, carried by quietly powerful performances from its central trio, takes viewers on an epic, surreal journey that demands attention but delivers rewards as an understated but existentially provocative film, defying easy explanation but offering lingering contemplation of what it means to be a family and what it might mean to be truly free.

VIEW A SCENE FROM THE FILM HERE.