Set in the majestic rural hinterland of Namibia, Under The Hanging Tree is a rare murder thriller where the slaughter on screen is overshadowed by a much larger real-life crime from over a century ago. Writer-director Perivi John Katjavivi packages this story as a contemporary film noir, but it is rooted in the first genocide of the 20th century, when German colonial forces massacred around 100,000 Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908. This large-scale exercise in ethnic cleansing helped lay the blueprint for the Holocaust decades later, and remains a highly contentious issue between Germany and Namibia even today.
As the son of a black Namibian politician father and white English mother, Katjavivi is well-placed to interrogate the deep scars of European colonialism in Southern Africa from an informed insider-outsider viewpoint. Under The Hanging Tree approaches this material from an elliptical angle, adding hints of supernatural horror and magic realism, not always a good fit for the film’s leisurely pace and mannered minimalism. Much of the narrative feels stagey and remote when it should be chilling and gripping. That said, this is a refreshingly original and often sublimely beautiful film. Following its world premiere in Rotterdam this week, it should appeal to festival programmers and African cinema aficionados, not least as a welcome rare gem from Namibia, whose tiny film industry has produced just a trickle of features since breaking free from South African rule in 1990.
Cloaked in an ominous, almost Shakespearean sense of portent, Under The Hanging Tree opens with an old Herero man (David Ndjavera) crouched under the stars beside a flickering fire, his ritualised incantation summoning his ancestors to bless their children and avenge historial crimes against their people. The narrative focus then cuts to Christina Mireti (Girley Jazama), a young police detective who is also of Herero heritage but living a modern urban existence, cut off from tradition. Katjavivi presents his heroine as sullen, silent and withdrawn, perhaps hinting at her colonised and deracinated mental state.
Christina’s latest crime case takes her away from the city and deep into the bush, presented here as a majestic widescreen canvas against which humans are reduced to insignificant grains of sand. In uneasy partnership with local police officer Hosea (Dawie Engelbrecht), she visits a murder scene at the farm of a white family who are descended from the original German settlers. Even though her husband’s mangled body now dangles from a “hanging tree”, a site associated with colonial atrocities, Eva (Roya Diehl) appears eerily calm.
After this slow-burn set-up, Under The Hanging Tree takes a jarring left turn into gothic horror terrain in its closing stages, when a tense showdown at the farm escalates into a bloody reckoning over German colonial crimes. Spitting racist insults at Christina, Eva is revealed to have family links to Eugen Fischer, the notorious Nazi anthropologist who conducted inhuman experiments on prisoners of war during the genocide in Namibia, and whose work later had a major influence on Hitler’s racist polices. This deranged finale involves poison, abducted children, ritual self-mutliation and fiery damnation. Which, frankly, should have been a lot more fun than Katjavivi makes it with his low-voltage, impressionistic art-house approach. A missed opportunity.
Divided into chapters, each introduced with an ancient Herero proverb, Under The Hanging Tree is an uneven but mostly rewarding screen experience. A major character in the story is the vast rolling hinterland around the Namibian capital Windhoek, which cinematographer Renier du Bruyn clothes in gorgeous bleached-out colours and blazing coronas of lens flare, often using off-balance horizon lines that suggest a world out of joint. Heavy on sound design, the audio mix is also a richly layered blend of natural and artificial elements, percolating with insect clicks and moaning winds and half-submerged voices, all invoking the unquiet ghosts of history. During the climax, a more conventional score comes into focus, deconstructed brass-band honks signalling the lingering cultural legacy of German occupation.
Under The Hanging Tree is a too slow and cryptic to work as a conventional crime thriller. Taciturn to a fault, the protagonists guard their secrets behind catatonically lugubrious poker faces while the plot often takes murky, confusing swerves. But viewed as a lightly experimental post-colonial revenge drama, this is an admirably ambitious and hypnotically beautiful oddity. The deep wounds of empire in Africa are a potentially fascinating dramatic subject, well suited to the kind of brooding film noir aesthetic that Katjavivi draws on for inspiration here. He often misses the target but still takes us on a haunting, intriguing, heartfelt journey.
Director, screenwriter: Perivi John Katjavivi
Cast: Girley Jazama, David Ndjavera, Roya Diehl, Dawie Engelbrecht
Cinematography: Renier du Bruyn
Editing: Khalid Shamis
Production design: Sonje Malherbe
Sound design: João Orecchia
Music: Mpumelelo Mcata, João Orecchia
Producers: Perivi John Katjavivi, Anna Teeman, Mpumelelo Mcata
Production companies: Old Location Films (Namibia), End Street Africa (South Africa)
World sales: Old Location Films
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In Afrikaans, German, English, Herero
90 minutes
