The Wound director: ‘To be out and proud is still a middle-class privilege in our society’

The Wound is about the relationships between three Xhosa men taking part in ‘ukwaluka’, the circumcision ceremony that Xhosa teenagers undergo as a rite of passage into manhood. During the two-week healing period, the boys are looked after by caregivers and elders of the community, who educate them in what it means to be an ‘indoda’ (‘real man’) – the most honourable form of masculinity.

John Trengove’s film, which won the award for best first feature at the 61st BFI London Film Festival, centres on Xolani (Nakhane Touré), who’s tasked with mentoring an initiate called Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini). Kwanda is unlike the other boys – he’s distinguished by his wealth, ‘city-boy’ mentality and homosexuality. Xolani returns to the remote mountains of South Africa’s Eastern Cape biannually for the initiation, secretly meeting with his childhood friend and lover, Vija (Bongile Mantsai), an alpha male and also a caregiver. Their romantic interactions are disrupted this time, as Kwanda soon picks up on the true nature of their relationship. He challenges them and their conceptions of masculinity, becoming a threat both to the lovers and to himself.

A graduate of the University of Cape Town and NYU, The Wound’s South African-born director previously made the short film Goat (2014), which similarly deals with a young Xhosa boy being initiated into manhood. Trengove has also worked in theatre and television, including the miniseries Hopeville. He lives between Johannesburg and São Paulo with his boyfriend Marco Dutra, the director of Good Manners (2017), which – like The Wound – screens at this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival.

Ahead of Flare, and The Wound’s UK release on 27 April, we met with Trengove to discuss this extraordinary first film, which interlinks issues of same-sex desire, cultural identity, patriarchy and generational divides into a provocative depiction of masculinity.

This has been by far the hardest and the most rewarding experience of my entire life. Going in I had huge reservations. I have always been critical of the idea of white filmmakers telling black narratives, so when this prospect was presented to me my first reaction was that it was almost inconceivable that I should be the one to make this film. At the same moment we felt that there was this dire need to have some authentic representation of black, queer communities in the South African film camp.

When we were about to start shooting there was a spate of very disturbing films that had been made in South Africa with really horrendous stereotyping of queer people, so simultaneous to there not really being the right kind of support for filmmakers to make the kind of film that we thought was important, there was also this sense of things being quite urgent, and something needing to happen. On the urging of our co-producer Batana Vundla, who is himself a gay, Xhosa man, I embarked on this process and waded into this terrain.

We worked with a real community of Xhosa men. They are not extras. They are a group of men who regularly enact this initiation. That gave us this incredible, almost documentary-like material. This very raw, very palpable footage that was just incredibly exciting. All our lead actors are first language Xhosa speakers, who have been through this initiation, and once we started shooting the bigger group scenes we quickly started stripping down their scenes and their performances to join this world.

The other thing that we did was to cast very close to these characters, so all of these leads have something that is in close in proximity to the characters that they were playing. It was a question of investing them with a huge amount of autonomy. How would you react in this moment? How does this make you feel? So that idea of collaboration is something that really permeated from the very beginning. It’s what has made this project so personal for so many people.

We have a very painful history of racial imbalance and race discrimination and so this idea of representation and who gets to tell stories is obviously something that is highly contentious and highly politicised. The film really steps into that conversation, and that means there is a lot of heat around it. There is a very strong homophobic subtext to a lot of the backlash that we have received, particularly from traditionalists who have not seen the film. The idea that we are speaking about sex between men in this very sacred space is certainly inflammatory and I would argue is the real cause for a lot of the backlash.

Yes. There’s a cocktail of elements flaring up. Ironically, the one thing you can say from my status as an outsider is that I was able to hone in on this one specific thing – this idea of same-sex desire – and facilitate something around that in a way that an insider might not have been able to do. An insider might have felt more obliged to make a much broader commentary on the initiation.

We never attempted to make a comprehensive essay about the initiation. There remains a huge amount to be said and unpacked around this ritual. This is not an exposé but rather a film that is set in this space where young boys are taught to be men. How are we teaching our boys to be men? What is this idea of masculinity? And who are these two characters who are forced to hide such a crucial part of their identity while they’re imparting this knowledge?

There is clearly a veiled homophobia at all sorts of levels of power that’s at play here. We were always going to be provocateurs. That was always the thing. But outright banning, which is what this amounts to – that’s a very fundamental constitutional issue that affects all of us.

We were never a gay activist film so it’s an uncomfortable role to be thrust into. We were also never meant to be an Oscar contender – so that was also an awkward role to wear for a while. I’m hoping that when the dust settles it will find its rightful space at a raw and somewhat problematic moment in our country’s history. 

From what I can tell, constitutionally speaking, this ruling by the FPB tribunal is completely out of line and there’s really zero foundation for it. It’s just a bureaucratic process, and I think we will get the decision overturned. We have a legal team doing pro bono work for the film, and we also have various other vested parties like SASFED (The South African Screen Federation) and the IPO (Independent Producers Organisation), who are also launching their own legal processes against the FPB. LGBTQ groups and freedom of speech organisations have also offered their support.

That’s absolutely right. And no it’s not beside the point. I think it’s very important. Just to clarify, myself, Batana Vundla, our co-producer, Elias Ribeiro – we’re all queer filmmakers and we identify as such.

That’s a very good question. I think that the conversation around race and tradition has completely overwhelmed the conversation locally. The way in which this is seen or understood as a queer film by a queer filmmaker comes second to that. Suffice it to say, we certainly have found our place on the international queer film festival circuit. The film is very warmly embraced in that context.

We made a provocative film and the intention of the film was always to transgress and challenge certain norms and ideas. Not just the norms and ideas of traditionalists but also the norms and ideas of so-called liberal, middle-class audiences who might engage with this film, particularly on an international platform.

To be an out and proud gay person is still regarded as a middle-class privilege in our society – that this is something that you get to do when all your other needs are taken care of and you’re living in a protected little enclave. But as soon as you move into the vast majority of the rest of the country, particularly the rural areas and the more impoverished areas of South Africa, this is just not something that exists – this idea that you can be out and proud and fight for your rights at all costs. Certainly, there are people who do do this in this community, and all power to them, because they are absolute soldiers, but it’s not something that can still be reasonably expected or protected by our system. That was an important thing for us to represent.

I was interested in shooting the whole film hand-held. I was interested in using only natural or available light, so all of these things made it quite a hard-sell to some of the local DOPs that I was speaking to. But then Paul Özgür came along and he is a young, hungry, brave guy.

When we filmed the group of Xhosa elders enacting the rituals, we were just running around catching those moments. There was something in that rawness, which then informed the rest of the grammar of the film.

The use of close-ups is something that came out of discussions that we had around representation. If you google Ulwaluko or the initiation you will see images that we started referring to as National Geographic images: beautiful African savannah and body-against-landscape-type compositions. It was an easy decision to say these characters don’t care about the landscape in that way, so let’s not pander to a western or ethnographic interest in this world. Let’s move the camera right up close to these men’s bodies because it’s their bodies that are significant. It’s what their bodies mean in a personal, sexual and social context that is the focus of the story. It was also a way of creating claustrophobia – a sense of building tension to give the feeling of this character who can’t get out of his situation.

Wardrobe-wise, the thing that is so characteristic of the contemporary South African and African experience is the amount of secondhand clothes that get shipped from other countries and just dumped. You often see it in the townships or rural areas – people wearing logos of Belgian football clubs or all sorts of weird Japanese cars. Strange brands will bleed into the South African landscape because of this phenomenon.

Initially, I had this idea to have branding everywhere – just Coca-cola and Ducati and all these international brands prominently displayed on people’s clothes as a way of bringing this collision together of the very traditional initiation and then this modern, westernised, capitalist, industrialised world. That wasn’t something I was able to pull off. There were too many legalities around branding, but we ended up making a fake football logo for Xolani’s t-shirt just as a way of bringing that idea in a little bit.

Because the whole film is outside society, there was a danger that you would watch it and not know whether the story was happening today or 50 or even 100 years ago, and so all of these elements like the father’s car, the electronic music, the modern wardrobe of the caregivers, the pylons in the background, the little crucifix around Vija’s neck – these were all little clues that I was dragging into the narrative as a way of painting a picture of another kind of world that lives just outside the boundaries out of the film.

In a lot of the conversations we’d had with young men who had been through the initiation, we explored the distinction between the urban and rural reality. From a rural perspective the urban is often equated with whiteness, so the idea of money and whiteness and being soft, which is a kind of euphemism for being gay, all of those things fit together in one strange intersectional space.

However, there’s another kind of logic that I came across quite often, which was that Kwanda’s father is the kind of guy who has gone off to the city and made his fortune, and in the process probably married a woman who is not from the Xhosa culture, so has he has lost a connection to his traditional identity and that is described as soft, meaning he has become soft. To then follow that logic, as a result of that alienation from his culture, it only makes sense that he would raise a son that is soft, ie gay. There is this way in which softness first extends to a loss of culture and then extends to a son’s sexuality. From a rural perspective there is a line that connects all of these ideas. I thought this was absolutely fascinating.

That’s a fantastic question and the answer is a resounding yes. Oliver’s film showed me what was possible for South African cinema, and I think that The Wound exists because of Skoonheid. Obviously they are two very different films, but there is definitely a line to be drawn there and I will always pay tribute to Oliver for making that film. There are certain things that you can compare: they are both films that speak more about patriarchy or masculinity than being traditional queer films. And both films were made by outsiders looking in on a culture, so they both have a certain claustrophobia because of the narrowness of that perspective.

I definitely want to make more South African films. This is an inspiration to keep pushing and to keep making films that are potentially uncomfortable. There is a tremendous amount of interrogating to be done. We’re in a fascinating moment in our history.

Internationally there has been interest. The Oscar campaign took us to LA, and there have been quite a few meetings there, so I’m now developing something for an American project. I’m also working with the UK-based producer Eric Abraham (Ida, Kolya) on a South African adaptation of a novel called Smell of Apples. It’s a very beautiful book that was published in the 1990s about a white, middle-class family in the 1970s that implodes. It will be an Afrikaans film, which is my first language, so that’s exciting for me.

The message at this stage is about self-censoring. The danger is if filmmakers start inhibiting the kind of work they do for fear of backlash and retribution. My hope would be that The Wound spurs people on to keep making challenging work rather than to self-censor. We’ve got a great constitution and we can fight anything in court, but if people aren’t prepared to even go to the effort of making difficult films then that bodes very badly for all of us.