Tess

The fact that Tess is a sex worker is almost incidental. She’s a young woman who is undergoing a tumultuous journey: facing the truth of her childhood, coming to terms with it and moving forward with her inner dignity intact. She is so unflinchingly honest that your skin itches; you feel her suffering like a punch in the gut and her catharsis like a purging of your own emotional closet.

We have shot a film that inhabits Tess on every level; where the cinematography, sound design and music are all about her experience of the world. We wanted to get into her eyes, to feel what she is feeling. Most of the film is handheld, because we want to create the feeling that the camera is present with the actors, moving, reacting and breathing with them.

Stylistically we were inspired by the organic, “honest” quality of films such as Fish Tank (dir. Andrea Arnold) and Biutiful (dir. Alejandro Iñárritu), while working in a very different setting and with an extremely different set of social realities. We have used exclusively found locations, bathed in intense African light and colour. The editing style prioritises emotional arc rather than continuity. Dialogue is in raw “street” Afrikaans and idiomatic South African English. The score is a brooding and pensive mix of guitar-driven ambiences, often blurring the lines between music and naturally occurring rhythms like heartbeats and train tracks.