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"When the real world comes knocking, you won't last two minutes, bro." Altered Innocence has debuted an official Us trailer for a South African drama titled The Harvesters, also known as Die Stropers (which translates directly to The Poachers) in Afrikaans. This premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and is getting a small theatrical release this fall. Brent Vermeulen plays a boy named Janno. He is "different, secretive, emotionally frail." One day his mother, fiercely religious, brings home Pieter, a hardened street orphan she wants to save, and asks Janno to make this stranger into his brother. The two start a fight for power, heritage and parental love. The cast includes Alex van Dyk, Juliana Venter, and Morné Visser. From Cannes' Un Certain Regard, "Kallos' debut feature film explores teenage angst and family dynamics set against a harsh yet stunning South African backdrop." Reminds me of God's Own Country in many ways.

“Afrikaners is plesierig, dit can julle glo,” runs the chorus of the rustiest chestnut in Afrikaans folk music. It isn’t heard, much less proven, in “The Harvesters,” South African writer-director Etienne Kallos’ muscular, mood-rich debut feature. Unusual within the annals of its national cinema for its searching examination of the country’s once-dominant, now-dwindling white Afrikaner population, this sternly moving, vividly shot rural drama draws quasi-Biblical resonance from its tale of teenage foster brothers locked in a familial and cultural power struggle on a remote farmstead. That a low-key queer undercurrent courses through the conflict somewhat broadens the festival and distribution prospects of the film, the fine social divisions of which will nonetheless be unfamiliar to many outside viewers; in a Cannes edition heavy on auspicious debuts, this is among the most excitingly complete.

It says much about the out-of-time nature of life in the Bible belt of South...