OFFICIAL SELECTION: ENCOUNTERS INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL (2024) WORLD PREMIERE
Through archive film and photographs, as well as intimate portrait interviews and sweeping landscape footage, Cape-Helena tells the story of the historical relationship between South Africa and one of the remotest Isles in the world – St. Helena Island.
Cape-Helena opens with a nostalgic reflection that the writer-director, Damian Sean Samuels, has for the Island. As a descendant of St. Helena immigrants he is the proxy – or stand-in – who conveys the enamoured sentiments of tens of thousands of South Africans who still share a profound mythological attachment to their Island of derivation. This is explored in an intimate way through the narrator’s sketchy family narrative, which he tries to piece together, as well as the stories of many other descendants of St. Helena immigrants, who still identify as St. Helenians today. Thereafter, the film moves to an exposition of the role the Island played in incarcerating many notable South Africans who fought British colonial rule – like King DinuZulu who was imprisoned there between 1890-1897, and the 5685 Boer Prisoners of War held captive on the Island between 1900-1902. By means of interviews with some of their descendants, the more critical attitudes towards the Island – which serves as both a symbol of British imperialism and of their ancestors’ valiant nationalist resistance to domination – are reflected. This is partially a story of a young South Africa in the making during British colonialism, prior to apartheid.
This documentary investigates what it may mean to identify with, and maintain a loyalty to, two places and time periods – the contemporary and the ancestral – which does create an uncomfortable sense of self as we attempt to reconcile our identities with the secular now and the mythological then. Since there are multiple overlapping stories to tell, the overarching purpose of this documentary is to rouse other underlying topics that exist and emerge in this relationship between South Africa and St. Helena. These include questions around race, immigration, identity, belonging, ancestry, war, and notions of respectability. The film’s tone is deliberately subtle and meditative: its aim is to evoke deep emotions in audiences as we interrogate, via interviews with many aged characters, the role of memory in defining ourselves, while taking stock of what we have inherited from the past and have lost to time.