Dead River

A young girl growing up in apartheid riven Namibia in the 1980’s befriends a local boy while visiting her mother’s grave; a relationship which will highlight the deep divisions in the society around them and which will shape their lives forever.

Lisa (Meinecke-Mareka) lives alone with her father on their farm in Namibia. They are German and have settled there to ‘turn the desert into a paradise’, something which Lisa’s father Adolf (Schneider) believes that the native people have failed to do. Much like the Boer and other white colonialists, Adolf believes himself to be better than the locals and understands apartheid to be the best way to represent that view and keep the peace – his peace.

With a hateful, racist view of the native people of the land, Adolf forbids Lisa from leaving the relative safety of the confines of the farmhouse, which includes going down to her mother’s grave. She goes there anyway, and while playing her recorder over the grave, a young native boy joins in and whistles along with her soft, lamentful tune. When her father eventually finds her there, and in turn the young boy with her, he turns aggressive and violent towards them both, beating and abusing the boy as Lisa runs home as fast as she can. That night Lisa is told to pack her things as she will be sent to a hostel to live in the morning.

Dead River picks up Lisa’s story more than twenty years later, from her life as a professional and a mother in Germany, when she receives a letter from a solicitor telling her the news she needs to hear in order to be able to go back and visit her old home. As Lisa tracks back on her old life and opens old wounds, we get to witness events in-between then and now which fill in the parts of the story we are missing, allowing Lisa’s story to develop and the friendship with the young boy, David (Ndjavera), who is now a man, to take centre stage.

Writer and director, Tim Huebschle has said that Dead River was a film he’d wanted to make for ‘the longest time’, as someone who grew up in the apartheid system in Namibia in the 1980’s and who was exposed to the politicism and the fractures in society that it created, even for those who were very young at the time. Dead River then becomes a very personal film for him and emerges as a dedication to the generation of children who grew up learning how to live within the apartheid system, before watching it crumble in front of them as the 1990’s dawned.

Focusing on just one family, and one friendship of a young girl, allows Huebschle to build a microcosm of the society he is trying to portray, without the need to bring in a whole nation, or nations, worth of history and trauma which might dilute the message. The personal story keeps things tight and focused, giving the uninitiated audience a way into the big themes that surround the film, while still allowing the difficult and problematic events and beliefs to be showcased.

Cinematographer, Frederik Füssel, captures the magnificent beauty of the Namibian countryside perfectly, allowing enough space and time for the landscape to tell its own story as the lives of those who live upon it play out before us. Composer, Alessandro Alessandroni, delicately matches the soft, mournfulness of Lisa’s situation with the hope and vitality of the surrounding land and its people, as the story becomes ever more fraught and the scenario more dire. While writer/director, Huebschle brings all of the elements of his story together into an intricate pattern of risk and redemption, as we witness the changes to the land and the characters over a space of decades. The playing of the scenario, too, is very well handled by Christin Meinecke-Mareka and David Ndjavera, even if they are not so well supported by the amateur actors around them, or who play their characters in different timeframes.

Despite the wide background to the story, and the decades spanning timeframe, Dead River does show its limitations at points, even in the intimate and personal moments. Some scenes just don’t fly very well, with poor delivery or not enough context, and the chopping up of the timeframes within the film doesn’t do it any favours, bringing up questions of continuity of character, or confusing the viewer without offering enough detail as to what’s being witnessed. Still, with enough heart and integrity behind the making of the film, and the personal, lived experience of its writer and director, Dead River emerges as a beautiful tale of a tragically difficult time, while treading respectfully over the past in order to present the future that a whole nation would like to see.