Number 37, beginning Friday, November 2, 2018.

Number 37, beginning Friday, November 2, 2018.

In her debut feature film Number 37, South African director Nosipho Dumisa stages a classic Hitchcockian tale against the raw backdrop of slum life in a forgotten quadrant of Cape Town. In a gritty homage to perennial Alfred Hitchcock favorite Rear Window, the movie points a lens on the residents of a block of apartments in the down-and-out Cape Flats neighborhood–which, with its petty thugs, crooked cops, violent loan sharks, and troubled pastors, soon reveals itself to be a very different place fromRear Window’s Greenwich Village of 1954.

One of South Africa’s first black female feature film directors, Dumisa won the Cheval Noir Best Director prize for Number 37 at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, just after the film’s world premiere at SXSW this past March. Dumisa also cowrote the script (alongside Daryne Joshua and Travis Taute), which brims both with sympathy for the hard-luck residents of the fictional Haven Mansions block of Cape Flats—the film was shot on location in the area, rendered in dusty, sunlit panoramas by celebrated cinematographer Zenn van Zyl and complemented by the stirring violins of James Mathes’s original score—and with the local details that keep the vigorous plot in motion until its inevitable end.

#Southafrican #BlackFemale #BlackFilms #BlackTwitter #Number37