South African short film Address Unknown is heading to the annual BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia for a world premiere on August 21.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival will be staged digitally, which is going to afford international audiences the opportunity to watch it via online platforms.
The 24-minute film will have its own South African debut which will premiere through the Durban International Film Festival that is also taking place in digital format next month.
The film is written by former journalist and anti-apartheid activist Anton Fisher and directed by Nadine Cloete.
Address Unknown centers around the life of a postman in District Six in Cape Town who faces the trauma of setting out to deliver letters and only to find many of the intended recipients no longer living at those addresses.
Everything happens at the backdrop of June 1976 uprisings when he decides to set off to Bonteheuwel, a Cape flats suburb, in search of his childhood friend.
Stars of the movie include Stefan Erasmus who appeared in the MNet Trackers, Irshaad Ally, who starred in the film Nommer 37 and Bianca Flanders who appears in the SABC2 sitcom The Riviera.
Cloete, 33, said she was excited that her film will feature at the Blackstar Film Festival because it was a perfect platform "to launch your work as a filmmaker".
The BlackStar Film Festival is described by its founders as a "celebration of the visual and storytelling traditions of the African diaspora and of global communities of colour, showcasing films by black, brown and indigenous people from around the world".
"I am very excited . Screening there will result in growing your own audience as a director. But what is special about the platform is that anyone in the world can watch the film by buying tickets online."
"Being part of the festival means that I'm recognised outside my country. I feel that though we created a film that is uniquely South African with Afrikaans language, the themes in the film are universal," Cloete said.
She added that it was important for her to tell the District Six story because she wanted to demonstrate that as the nation, South Africa still has a lot of healing work to do.
"I think the film really brings such issues to the surface, it further brings to the surface the mental issues and the trauma that we still carry because of some of the things that were never resolved.
"Years ago I was a researcher for the book called These Are the Things That Sit with Us. Even though we have a democracy there are things that just sit with us. Whether they sit with your grandmother or your mother, it forces that intergenerational conversation."
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