Beloved People, I can´t believe, but it´s true: Another year has passed and without even recognizing, the Berlinale is back again! Today it´s the opening day!

We gonna start the TEDDY programme with the Panorama opening-film called “The Wound”, which is running in CinemaxX 7 at 9 pm. In this debute feature film, South African film maker John Trengove is showing circumcision rituals and two men who are beginning to question these rituals.

In calm and detailed shots, Kwandas perspective as an outsider is shown, who has to live in a world which is rejecting him for what he is.

The Wound
The Wound

South Africa/Germany/Netherlands/France 2016
88′
Director: John Trengove
Cast: Nakhane Touré, Bongile Mantsai, Niza Jay Ncoyini

Eastern Cape, South Africa. A lonely factory worker, Xolani, takes time off his job to assist during an annual Xhosa circumcision initiation into manhood. In a remote mountain camp that is off limits to women, young men, painted in white ochre, recuperate as they learn the masculine codes of their culture. In this environment of machismo and aggression, Xolani cares for a defiant initiate from Johannesburg, Kwanda, who quickly learns Xolani’s best kept secret, that he is in love with another man. Having first explored male circumcision in his short film IBHOKHWE, South African director John Trengove revisits this topic and other rituals of masculinity in his first feature. The tension that builds inexorably throughout the film derives on the one hand from the young Kwanda who increasingly calls into question the patriarchal codes of the initiation, as well as the unbearable crisis building in Xolani as he must choose between the traditional world that he knows, and his own fulfillment.

09.02. / 21:00 CinemaxX 7