SOMETIMES TO TELL a story, rich in its cultural complexity and diverse in its energy, all you need is a simple golden thread that you hold onto with perspicacity and courage, allowing everything else to fit into place. But this is not a simple task. It takes the kind of directorial courage to recognise that thread. And then to allow silences to remain naked, and to give a child his instinctive energies. The Heart is a Muscle, a South African Oscar contender is one of those films which is as close to perfection as you can get. It touches the fabric and the nerve centre of a community made ugly by sensationalism, bruised by gang warfare, but profoundly human – and thus universal – at its core.
Set in the notorious Cape Flats where poverty prevails and where one’s comeuppance can come in the form of someone else’s fist for no real reason other than his personal issues, the story is about fatherhood. In the late 1990s, HBO produced a TV series about jail life in a microcosm of an American jail. Oz was its name. We in South Africa were lucky enough to have it on our daily SABC fare. It contained every taboo you can imagine, from language to nudity, blasphemy to sexism. The magnificence of Oz was in the stories it constructed around characters deemed ugly and frightening and condemned as such forever, by broader society. The power of the series was that it forced you to look at humanity with a different gaze. One of compassion. One stripped mercilessly of cliché.
And it is along these lines that we meet Ryan (Keenan Arrison). With a tattoo on each of his knuckles, allowing the cinematographer’s lens to point without blatancy at the fact that he has had a past, he drives his five-year-old son, Jude (Troy Paulse), home. It is these few opening moments of a child in a shopping trolley, a cursory conversation about marshmallows, the gentle communication between young father and small boy that doesn’t need structure, that sets the tone for this entire, achingly beautiful film.
It’s about the wiliness of a five-year-old and the mess of geographical possibilities in the Cape Flats and what can happen in the blink of an eye to a little boy who recognises a grown-up’s hand and an ostensibly friendly gesture, without analysing it or colouring it in fear. It’s about the instant hysteria you experience when your world seems to have fallen out of its mooring, that isn’t about screaming and shouting, but is contained in a paralysing silence that makes you reflect on the horrors of history and bad things that have happened before.
It’s a film that will shake you to the centre of who you think you are, with its emotionally clear and profound yet almost cursory reflection on family values, reaching boldly beyond stereotype and painting a portrait of a community that you cannot look at again with the bias that you might have held before. It’s about how little boys can speak the language of dinosaurs without borders or rules and how that is enough.
- The Heart is a Muscle is written and directed by Imran Hamdulay and features a cast headed by Abduragman Adams, Ridaa Adams, Keenan Arrison, Ayden Croy, Melissa de Vries, Eb Inglis, Luna Louw, Dean Marais, Troy Paulse, Danielle Rhode, Danny Ross, Robyn Rossouw and Lincoln van Wyk. Produced by Lesley-Ann Brandt, Khosie Dali, Imran Hamdulay and Brett Michael Innes, it features creative input by Tapiwa Musvosvi (music), Kabeer Shaik (cinematography), and Paul Speirs (editing). It is in Afrikaans with English sub-titles and releases at Cinema Nouveau Rosebank and the Bioscope in Auckland Park on 6 March 2026.