Project Description

Project Summary
PROJECT TITLE: Tess
FORMAT: Theatrical Feature
LOGLING: When sex worker Tess falls pregnant, she has to fight to keep her past from swallowing her whole.
TAGLINE: I’ll take your breath away
GENRE: Drama
LANGUAGE: 70% Afrikaans, 30% English
WRITER: Tracey Farren, based on her novel Whiplash
DIRECTOR: Meg Rickards
PRODUCERS: Paul Egan & Kim Williams
PRINCIPAL CAST: Christia Visser, Nse Ikpe-Ekim, Brendon Daniels
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Boondogle Films
Synopsis
Sassy twenty-year-old Tess sells her body on Cape Town’s streets. She survives by popping painkillers by the bunch and through her wry humour. But her life turns upside down when she falls pregnant. Though Tess tries to run, her past torments her. She begins to question her own sanity. Tess fights back, fighting her demons, searching for the truth. A gritty no-holds-barred drama, shot in found locations in a living, breathing handheld style.
Statement from Director Meg Rickards
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.
Main Cast
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What the Critics Said
Important and unflinching, Tess neatly flips the script.
Dramaties. Besielend. Sielsopenbarend.
This film is like a hard punch that winds you because you almost can’t believe how cruelly people treat each other.
Yet Tess reminds you that you don’t need to be a victim of your circumstances.