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It was a calculated risk lock-picker Randal Hendricks (Irshaad Ally) was willing to make. Borrow twenty-five thousand dollars from a loan shark he’s known since childhood (Danny Ross’ Emmie) and flip it to some gangsters willing to give him a deal on drugs. Sell the drugs at a mark-up and he should have enough to get himself and his girlfriend Pam (Monique Rockman) out of their rough Cape Town slum. Like Emmie warned, however, gangsters aren’t to be trusted. So when we meet Randal again months later to discover him a paraplegic being carried to his apartment by a neighbor (Ephram Gordon’s Warren), it’s easy to assume things went south. Now broke, unable to walk, and indebted to a psychopath, the clock on his life begins counting down.

Writer/director Nosipho Dumisa’s Number 37 picks up much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window began: at a window,...

Exclusive: Hot SXSW title Number 37, a Hitchcockian South African crime thriller, is heading to theaters in the U.S. after Dark Star Pictures picked up all North American rights.

The film, which is the directorial debut of Nosipho Dumisa, is to get a fall theatrical release, starting in New York and L.A., followed by an early winter video-on-demand release.

Number 37, which started out as a short film before picking up steam after the festival route, aired as part of the Narrative Feature section at the Austin fest earlier this year.

The plot of the Afrikaans-language pic is an homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window and centers on Randall, a low-level criminal recently crippled in an illicit deal gone wrong. Cooped up in his apartment in a rough Cape Town neighborhood, he is heavily indebted to a loan shark named Emmie with the clock ticking for him and his girlfriend...