SCAR is a coming-of-age love story about identity and doomed friendship in a world where manhood and machismo are tragically confused.

Johannesburg, the present. A hot summer. In a rough township of Thokoza, nineteen-year-old Mpho takes care of his ailing grandfather, Nkosi, and fervently dreams of becoming a rap star. Instead, he makes ends meet performing at weddings with his grandfather, a failed 50's jazz musician.

Mpho is in love with Etty, the most beautiful girl on the streets, but she is the girlfriend of Paradise, Mpho's childhood friend and a feared gangster, now serving time in prison for armed robbery. Upon his release, Paradise forces Mpho to help him rob the butcher's shop where Nkosi works. While they hide out in the city, Paradise encourages Mpho to do a cheap demo-recording of a song he had learnt in prison. Fuelled by his new status as an outlaw, Mpho finally discovers the hardcore voice he has been craving for. The song is a wild and exhilarating war cry. Etty joins them and they flee Johannesburg with the police in hot pursuit, their destination the ocean, which Paradise and Mpho have longed, ever since childhood, to see.

They get waylaid in the rural hills of Kwa Zulu-Natal. In the forest, hooded men, strapped to each other with their own belts, engage in knife fights whilst other men place their bets. Paradise taunts Mpho, forcing him to prove his new gangster persona. Simmering tensions between the three eventually explode when Paradise challenges Mpho to the bloody game of death; Etty is the prize. In a bid to save both their lives, Etty runs off and reveals their location to the police.

Police converge on the hills and capture Mpho. Paradise rescues Mpho killing two policemen but he too is fatally wounded.

Mpho and Etty take a weakening Paradise to the sea. On the beach police catch up with them. Mpho wades into the water with a near dead Paradise and releases him into the waves, then hands himself over to the police.

Directed by:
Teboho MAHLATSI

Country:South Africa
Duration:96.00 minutes
Color / Black and White : Couleur
Locations and shooting dates: Johannesburg & Kwa Zuku Natal, oct-06, 8 weeks, 35 mm
Language film shot in ENGLISH, ZULU
Working budget: 2 500 000
Financing acquired: 1250000 not secured


Teboho MAHLATSI - Réalisation


Production
BOMB - Eastern Service Road, - Marlboro, Gauteng - AFRIQUE DU SUD - desiree@bomb.co.za


Statement
I have always been interested in the notion of what defines manhood. Growing up in a country with a violent history, manhood has often been defined by acts of machismo and violence. My interest also lies in exploring the loss of innocence as a result of this violence. During Apartheid, young black people took up arms for their freedom. Boys suddenly became men. Today, in the new free society, violence is appropriated by young Kwaito artists into gangster mythology in order to validate their hardcore status. Some of these artists all at once become overnight successes.

So I am fascinated by this idea of reconstruction of identity and how the public, especially young people in the townships, readily embrace and worship their new heroes. I started thinking about making a film about a talented boy who wants to make it as a musician in a society where often what is seen as real, successful and celebrated, is closely linked to aesthetics and representations of violence. His gangster childhood friend comes out of prison and helps him with the transformation.

But in looking at this theme and its relation to contemporary South African society and its youth, I don't want to be judgmental. How can I be when this music and its hardcore sensibilities are seen by millions of impoverished young people as a way out of the ghetto? They see their peers, with their lives transformed from nothing, now driving around in luxury cars thanks to just one hit song.

The idea for this film came after working with two young actors from the same neighbourhood in Soweto who played the same character (during different seasons) of a township gangster in a television drama I directed.
The character became very popular amongst young people and the actors found themselves overnight stars. The actor who played the gangster in the first season of the show became very affected by all this sudden fame and attention, and decided not to take part when we wanted to film the second season.

We then found a new actor who came in and transformed himself to look exactly the same as the gangster in the first part. He became just as successful, if not even more so. But in his case he took advantage of his new image outside the show and recorded an album using his gangster persona. He was immediately crowned a new king of Kwaito music by both the media and the public.

With "Scar", I see the story as simply how a young man's identity can shift during his journey towards manhood, and the choice he has to make between the strong, moral values of his grandfather and the hardcore, violent and seductive values of his gangster childhood friend who has just been released from prison.

I want to make this film in a fresh, kinetic new style not often associated with the slow, studied images of African cinema. I see this occupying the new, urban, edgy landscape explored in the work of Wong Kar Wai, or films like Amores Perros ("Love's a Bitch" by Alejandro González Iñárritu), La Haine ("Hate" by Mathieu Kassovitz), Cidade de Deus ("City of God" by Fernando Meirelles), and road elements of Y tu mamá también ("And Your Mother Too" by Alfonso Cuarón). At the same time, I want this film to have an emotional depth in how the love triangle, which lies at the heart of the story, plays itself out. Films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the playfulness and charm of Godard's Bande à part ("Band of Outsiders") also come to mind.

I grew up watching kung-fu films and westerns, and, in many ways, I see this as a kind of action picture combined with elements of the above, yet deeply rooted in an African landscape and the socio-politics of the new democratic South Africa.