AiM After Hours

SMS Sugar Man - UK Premiere

Thu 30 Oct at 10.30pm

Aryan Kaganof | South Africa 2006 | 1h25m | DVD | English | 18

Johannesburg - an evil, ugly city on a Christmas Eve. This is the turf of the lonely and the damned and no more damned can they be than Sugar Man (Kaganof) cruising the streets in his Automatic 1966 Valiant 200, continually on his mobile phone, peddling his girls to wealthy black punters.

This tongue in cheek inversion of the apartheid-years scenario of Afrikaans business men popping off to homelands to sample black girls is delivered with ironic force. From hotel to palatial apartment, he and the girls journey like Joseph and Mary looking for a room. The process of the night will awaken something in Sugar Man that will be born on Christmas Day.

Strangely romantic, consciously transgressive and aesthetically audacious - shot entirely on mobile phone cameras - the film is also a homage to Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville. A checkered production history, plagued by disagreements between director and producer, almost accepted for Cannes but rejected after Kaganof refused to make alterations insisted on by the selectors, the film is destined to share the same floor as Citizen Kane and El Topo in the great Cinematheque Hotel of the Akashic Records.

SMS Sugar Man and Jesus and the Giant kick off the AiM After Hours series of late-night screenings, featuring provocative, daring and unusual African films. All the late night screenings will be introduced by South African writer, critic, director and actor Trevor Steele Taylor. Trevor kindly programmed the AiM After Hours series and provided synopses for the films.