watch Every Seven short film here.
‘Every Seven’ holds an archive of an era of a small community on the fringes. Surrounded by golden wheat fields, segregated and forgotten - there are little cultures emerging out of a non-superficial society bubbling with creatively frustrated youths. In a place where everybody leaves, each generation has a very short lifespan, churning together barefoot children with pink sunsets and spitting out warm hearted, tough footed people into colder, scraped skies.
Albeit subtle, there is an abrasive contrast in the city. People are magnetised to places categorised by how they wish to be perceived.
There is a discomfort and an ugliness about being in community. You are witnessed in all your forms. Your banality, the muddiness of your grief, your dishevelled morning eyes and tired, repeated clothes. You are seen. This love is non-dual. It is multiplicit. This love walks around freely in the streets, is not contained to homes, is not only in the inside of your car, but freely wonders through the eyes and smiles of those who pass you by. Everybody knows where you are. Everybody knows how you are. You cannot fool anybody. Dirty laundry hangs around the streets and houses; yours and everybody else’s. Sometimes it can be unbearable. If you have any good sense, you will leave. And that we do.
This place, often compared to the unendingly surprising worlds crafted by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, aches in its socio-politically loaded geography.
Riebeek Kasteel, a large part of which was formerly known as Oukloof, executed one of the many forced removals as part of the Group Areas Act in 1965. A single train track cuts through the Valley and acts as a ruler enforcing segregation to this day.
Once fertile with the lives of the hunting Khoi Sanquas, Khoikhoi cattle farmers, fynbos, marshlands, rhinoceros, hippopotamuses and lions, the mountain watches on as the land became a vast patchwork quilt of capitalistic conquest with little regard for the flowering it tramples on - in human, flora & fauna.
There is said to be a lone leopard rarely spotted on the dark green mountain, trapped amongst the patchwork quilt of homogenous crop, pesticides and nets.
Yet, flowers bleed through the cracks and there is connection to be found despite the pasts in the present. The train tracks sit metallic amongst the kinships blooming under the blazing sun.
