MARIGOLDS IN AUGUST


Title   Cast   Director   Year Shown  Other Info    Country  Notes 




South Africa , 87 min

Shown in 1980

CREDITS

dir
Ross Devenish
prod
Jonathan Cohen
scr
Athol Fugard
cast
Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona, John Kani, Joyce Hesha, Mabel Ntshinga, Dudu Nene, Zola Marwanqua

Marigolds in August is the third film on which the famous playwright Athol Fugard and director Ross Devenish have worked together. The others were Boesman and Lena and The Guest, which have won international prizes at various film festivals. Fugard considers this film as a part of a trilogy, each focusing on an important dimension of South African realities, specifically the colored (mixed race) people, the Afrikaaner and, in Marigolds in August, the African. Fugard is a literary pioneer in dramatizing the interracial struggle against apartheid in South Africa and his plays, The Blood Knot and the double bill of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island have been heralded throughout the American cities in which they have been performed. He is the director of the Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth, an interracial company that presents a repertoire including works by Genet, Brecht and Sophocles. This film is set in and around a small seaside holiday hamlet, for white South Africans only, called Schoenmakerskop. It is an area of high Black unemployment, with as many as one in five workers jobless. As a result, malnutrition and infant mortality are rampant. Daan, a poor but employed Black South African man, is on his way to work one morning when he sees Melton, a jobless Black. Melton and his wife have just buried one of their children. Later, Daan is approached by Melton, causing a sense of foreboding, because this stranger's visit is clear: Daan's meagre means of livelihood is in danger. The suspicions and mistrust between the two men intensify because Daan's papers are not in order and he fears that Melton's desperate need for the survival of his family will cause him to commit a crime. A third man, Paulus, appears and becomes an unwilling mediator between Daan and Melton. The moral dilemma the film presents is acted out with tremendous power and a mixture of anguish and occasional humor. Marigolds in August is a filmic metaphor in which South African lives flourish out of touch with the seasons, hoping to survive in an unnatural habitat of indifferences.

—Albert Johnson

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