HUMAN BEINGS HAVE an ugly propensity to be cruel to one another. To throw children to the proverbial wolves out there. To lack basic empathy. The Namibian film Lukas, puts a human face on all of these horrors. Compiled from the true stories of 23 homeless Namibian children, it’s a gritty, hard-to-watch essay on poverty and the diseases of addiction, violence and survival tactics that it leaves in its wake. It’s currently being screened by Ster-Kinekor for a brief season of films from southern Africa.

Something akin to a contemporary Oliver Twist, yet one without the relief of a charmed ending or even one that gives comfort in its closure, the film is rough and heart-breaking. Not a documentary in the formal sense, but one like Sibikwa’s 2016 work Chapter 2 Section 9, it is many truths singing in horrifying cohesion. It takes you, by the hand of a little boy, an only child, into the vortex of homelessness and the faces of people who cannot lend a hand to a little one, because they have their own priorities and are stretched to the limit. At times, the performances are stilted, but it is the lava-like flow of abuse and helplessness, the terrible cycles of damage inflicted and lives broken, that keep you focused and constantly wishing to pull away.

Set in Gobabis and Windhoek over a period of 15 years, the work double takes across time, telling a story of brutality in sequences that reflect on an understanding of trauma through repetition and revisiting. But the story is not specific to Namibia. Look at the man who spends his day, sitting at the traffic intersection that you negotiate every day of your life. What is his story? How did he find this piece of pavement, where he begs and sleeps, holds body and soul together in penetrating heat and fierce cold? Does he pay rent to a gang lord for this space? Has he killed another in order to sleep on this corner?

What is it that can strip a little boy of his childhood peccadilloes and reduce him to a creature who must just get through the next night? A creature who, when he finds a used piece of filthy cardboard on a roadside, sees it as a bed. A creature who will go through dustbins and submit himself to the disgusting whims of passing strangers with their lies and sexual fantasies just for a meal in his stomach or the next drug fix.

Lukas is a very difficult to watch film. Its unequivocal star is Alejandro Cooper, the child performer who embodies the main character as a little boy. There’s a deep understanding of guttural emotion here. A child who like the central character in the haunting Lebanese film Capernaum (2019), represents a mirror on the universe through his innocence and susceptibility to dreams that get broken.

• Lukas is directed by Philippe Talavera and written by Mikiros Garoes. It features a cast headed by Mara Baumgartner, Felicity Celento, Alejandro Cooper, Roya Diehl, Dawie Engelbrecht, Sydney Faroa, Hernandes Gaonakgosi, Lucky Peters, Treazurique Titus and Adriano Visagie. Part of a showcase of films from Africa, it is being screened by Ster Kinekor during the month of March alongside Frankie en Felipe, #Lovemyselfie, The Bush Knife and The Bad Bishop.