Cane/Cain
"A captivating story of migration, desire and sexuality and their intersections in urban Johannesburg. It’s 2008 and the blood of xenophobia’s stench is etched on the streets of Johannesburg By day, the solitary figure of ABEN, an Indian South African (23) runs his restaurant in the viby, predominantly Muslim, Indian community of Fordsburg. But by night, Aben is haunted by a childhood memory in the soft, silent swathes of Durban’s sugar cane fields. TARIQ (22), an intense, Pakistani immigrant scrapes a living from his mobile cart, selling freshly ground sugar cane drinks which he perches, daily opposite Aben’s restaurant. Tariq’s presence from across the road begins to infiltrate Aben’s world. An undercurrent of unspoken, sexual confidence builds within the safety of distance between them. That distance is shattered when one Friday afternoon, as the community pray in the Mosque, an angry mob heads to Aben’s shop, the only one open. Terrified, and with some relief, they run towards a vulnerable and exposed Tariq . As Aben watches through his blinds, the mob attacks Tariq swiftly, ruthlessly. Their eyes meet. In Aben’s flat, he gently attempts to dab Tariq’s wounds, their first intimate encounter. For the first time, he speaks to Aben – telling him of his wife, child and family he must support in Pakistan. Aben listens. Riddled by guilt, by desire, by the need to heal, he reaches out to Aben. They touch and finally, they surrender to each other. As the night ensues, and love making builds to its crescendo, Tariq re-enacts the act of violence, sexually, that Aben failed to deliver him from. And Aben is transposed back to the sugar cane fields, the tumbling of bodies, of laughter and joy of falling in love with his best friend, Cane – touching, caressing, and the consequences of that joy – Cane’s suicide in those same fields. The night is one of catharsis, but as daylight breaks, and Aben wakes to an empty bed, the call to prayer highlights the beginning of a new day, a day like all the rest, or perhaps, not quite."
YEAR
2011
RUN TIME
15m
DIRECTOR
Jordache A. Ellapen
Durban International Film Festival 2011
San Francisco South Asian International Film Festival 2011
Film Africa 2012
Indenture Aesthetics Book
Directed by Jordache A. Ellapen
Starring Lamar Bonhomme, Jesse Dullabh, Vivek Mehta, and Thee Ayanda Seoka
Explore more of Jordache A. Ellapen's work in their book, Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness, now available through Duke University Press
In Indenture Aesthetics, Jordache A. Ellapen examines the visual and performance art practices of feminist, queer, femme, and gender-nonconforming Afro-Indian and South African black artists to understand the paradoxes of freedom in contemporary South Africa. Tracing the afterlife of apartheid-era racial categories and revisiting Bantu Stephen Biko’s Black Consciousness, Ellapen theorizes South African blackness through the Indian Ocean World, showing how the development of an Afro-Indian identity after generations of indentured labor and segregation troubles persistent racial hierarchies. Staging unexpected encounters between artists such as Sharlene Khan, Mohau Modisakeng, Lebohang Kganye, and Reshma Chhiba, he analyzes how their works challenge these racial categories to create new imaginaries of freedom. Situated in a context in which the authentic (hetero)normative black subject of the post-apartheid state is bracketed from other formulations of blackness, these artists' aesthetic practices, alongside those of other artists like Ellapen himself, disrupt desires for national belonging and catalyze alternative and transgressive politics and subjects. By rethinking the relationship between blackness, Afro-Indianness, and Africanness, Ellapen highlights the role of the aesthetic in crafting a blueprint for coalitional building across difference in contemporary South Africa.