'The Heart is a Muscle'. SA's Oscar entry

EARLIER this week, Imran Hamdulay's The Heart is a Muscle was put forth as South Africa's official entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.

- DEBASHINE THANGEVELO

This feat is huge for the writer and producer, who marked his directorial debut with the crime drama.

I got to see the film at the 13th Silwerskerm Film Festival, and I was blown away by the storyline trajectory.

Set in the Cape Flats, the film opens with Ryan (Keenan Arrison) and his wife Laila (Melissa de Vries) hosting the family for their son Jude's (Troy Paulse) fifth birthday celebration.

But it quickly devolves into a frantic search for Jude, who disappears while playing outside.

At the outset, it appears that a kidnapping is the main thrust of the film. It isn't.

Hamdulay's writing finesse shines as he uses this moment as a trigger to delve into socially pertinent, yet unspoken, subject matters such as transgenerational trauma and toxic masculinity. It is underpinned by social conditioning as well.

In an interview ahead of the festival, Hamdulay said: "The title, The Heart is a Muscle, suggests both emotional memory and physical endurance."

When pushed to expand, he added: "The story lives in a space between opposites: between emotion and physicality, between memory and motion, between fragility and endurance. In families and communities like mine, there are fractures left by history, by time, by apartheid, and by inherited silence.