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David Hickson

News

David Hickson

David McBrayer
Beat the Drum
David McBrayer
Screened

Mill Valley Film Festival


MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.

It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.

Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.

McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film

there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.

The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.

BEAT THE DRUM

Z Prods.

Credits:

Director: David Hickson

Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer

Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw

Director of photography: Lance Gewer

Production designer: Johnny Breedt

Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi

Costume designer: Ruy Filipe

Editor: Mark Winitsky

Cast:

Musa: Junior Singo

Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng

Nobe: Owen Sejake

Pieter: Clive Scott

Stefan: Tom Fairfoot

Letti: Noluthando Maleka

Running time -- 114 minutes

No MPAA rating...
  • 7/9/2004
  • The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
David McBrayer
Beat the Drum
David McBrayer
Screened

Mill Valley Film Festival


MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.

It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.

Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.

McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film

there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.

The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.

BEAT THE DRUM

Z Prods.

Credits:

Director: David Hickson

Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer

Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw

Director of photography: Lance Gewer

Production designer: Johnny Breedt

Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi

Costume designer: Ruy Filipe

Editor: Mark Winitsky

Cast:

Musa: Junior Singo

Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng

Nobe: Owen Sejake

Pieter: Clive Scott

Stefan: Tom Fairfoot

Letti: Noluthando Maleka

Running time -- 114 minutes

No MPAA rating...
  • 11/12/2003
  • The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.

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