Ian Gabriel
Born 1951, Durban (South Africa). In the 1970s and 1980s he worked at Dorkay House, Johannesburg’s famous multi-racial theatre, with many of South Africa’s legendary jazz and theatre greats. Then he became one of South Africa’s most prolific commercial directors, earning a reputation throughout the world and working with talents and personalities as diverse as Nelson Mandela, Cristiano Ronaldo, Charlize Theron, Miriam Makeba. In 2004 he directed his first feature film, FORGIVENESS, which was screened at the 2004 Locarno Film Festival. FOUR CORNERS, his second feature film, was selected as the South African entry at the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Director’s statement
“Strength of family was a starting point and inspiration for this film. I hoped to evolve a film about family lost and family regained, and to show it from many shifting perspectives, especially from the point of view of a young boy, because I know that story. I wanted to make a film that dealt with these trials and conflicts, the desire for family, and the absence of family, and the desire to reform and make things whole within the context of gangsterism. I wanted to look at how difficult it might be for a father, a gangster, to turn the clock back and set things right. I hoped to portray a gangster film in a largely unknown world. And reveal it in a fresh way”.
“This was my process when I met Hofmeyr Scholtz to discuss writing the project. I explained that I wanted to tell a redemptive story about family – about a father, about a son, about a cop who is watching family and young children threatened, and life eroded from outside. The creative process was organic, at a later stage we added a daughter who had lost her father from ‘before’ he died. We decided she should be an outsider returned who knows and reacts against the tough landscape of her youth that she had wanted to escape from, yet feels its roots pulling her back – a common sensation that South Africans and Africans in exile experience. We developed a ‘surrogate’ father that a boy in need of a father might find. So there we had it – Four corners, four lives and sounding boards influencing one boy’s life, reflecting the Four Corners of a chessboard and the Four Corners of a prison cell. And each of these simple stories connected with the next to make up the Four Corners in the chessboard of Ricardo’s life”.
“Decisions made by Ricardo’s coming of age would cause all four surrounding stories to converge and become his unique single story, with a single resolve during a significant week in his life. I knew structurally this would be exciting but challenging to achieve but would reflect a bit of how life really is, where chance encounters can lead to dramatic events and significant resolutions that echo from one generation down to the next”.
“Just a few kilometres from where I live in Cape Town is the unique world of the Cape Flats where gangsterism is rife and where a boy like Ricardo, the hero of our story, might be drawn by the power and prestige of the gangs. In this world I knew actors would be able to find a special connection to their characters if we were able to absolutely truthfully portray the world that the characters inhabited. We wanted the performances and the reality of the story to be immediate, spontaneous and visceral, to blur the boundary between real life and film, so we looked both among actors and also non-actors who had intense experience of life in the Flats”.
“We knew we needed to make our film in the real districts of the Cape Flats, in the shadows of the turf war because our first responsibility was to tell the truth, as much as we could. The film is about darkness and light, and the interplay of both these aspects in the human conflict that is flow of life. That interplay was present on the set every day”.
