YOU KNOW THE guy who sits on a pavement that you pass every day? The guy who stands at the traffic light you drive through on your way to doing your life?  Maybe you give him something. Maybe you don’t. He’s there in the heat of the day. He’s sometimes there in the harshest of rainstorms. Where does he sleep? Who does he come home to? What happens to him when he catches a cold? Have you ever taken a step back and considered him as a person, with loves and values, fears and needs? Have you noticed how often God is invoked in the placards of woe wielded by beggars at traffic lights? Michael James’s film God’s Work, on this year’s Johannesburg Film Festival, offers a surreal and rich reflection on the ‘unhoused’ of this country.

Homelessness is a quality central to so much of this contemporary world, fuelled as it is by higher and higher basic living expenses. And Durban, in KwaZulu-Natal, is no stranger to this. It is here where we meet Thobani (Mbulelo Radebe), Simphiwe (Thobani Nzuza), Khaya (Zenzo Msomi) and Malusi (Omega Mncube). They’re fuelled by drugs and the detritus of community. Death prevails and living is harsh. It’s a tale of fighting against all odds to do something in the world, even if it is to swindle a druglord of some cash and get out of town to breathe.

And the texture and visual language of a life cast hither and yon by political rally and the promise of hope, the sjamboks wielded by the cops, psychodelic effects that come with crack and a bit of trainspotting in between is handled with potency. It’s an immersive and frightening experience, which you should gain on a big screen in a dark theatre.

That said, the work is book-ended by the directorial presence. The performers are punted as real homeless people under the microscope of a very woke young white director. He wants to make a film about their lives. And interview them. And subject them to his box ticking and crude parameters that they see as trickery and games, but a possible source of income. It’s a clumsy narrative and film device which hurts your reading of the characters: they become two-dimensions siphons of a story. It’s a cringey device that lifts the film from the terrifying harshness of the street and into something safe, benign and contained. This is a pity.

But the film is punctuated with scenes of the most astonishing beauty that will give you goosebumps. These cinematographic moments smoothly blend reality with other things, and the effect is so discomforting that you let logic go and pull your heart and senses into the moment. Simphiwe loves crack. There is a moment in a church confessional which offers us an inroad into his heart. But is it real or dreamed? And does it matter?

It’s a work about ghosts and trains and broken promises. Of a brother lost and eternally a child in the white clay of an initiate. Of a mother who drank and abandoned her child to the vagaries of the world. Of a drug lord in underpants with a machete called Verwoerd that you must kiss to gain access to his apartment, and a vast room of the dead. Of a woman who has been waiting one full year for a train to arrive. Many of the images, associations and concatenations of values hold no logic, in a portrayed world where language and its meaning are frayed from one another, with strobes and fear and circumstances.

The film presents the kind of microcosm of the universe in four men that you may have experienced in television series such as HBO’s Oz, or Samuel Beckett’s plays that evoke the lonely insanity of the human condition. And with filmmaking tropes of this nature, it casts a spotlight on each, in his turn, to offer us a glimpse of their innards and history. You emerge with a palpable sense of murkiness on your spirit, possibly a light-sensitive haze around your vision, and a headful of ideas about humanity.

• God’s Work is written and directed by Michael James. With a cast headed by Nduduzo Khowa, Omega Mncube, Zenzo Msoma, Thobani Nzuza, Mbulelo Radebe and Siyabonga Xaba, it is produced by Sithabile Mkhize and features creative input by George Acogny (composer), Jared Hinde (cinematography) and Pumza Ralo (casting). In isiZulu and English with English subtitles, it screens at 4:15pm on 8 March 2026, at Artistry, 22 Fredman Drive, Sandown, Sandton, as part of the Joburg Film Festival.