When my grandfather turned a hundred it was almost prophetic for me to adapt his favorite book for my next feature film. “Hans crosses the Rubicon”, tells the story of a hard-headed 90-year-old widower, Hans van Kraainburg, who is forced by his estranged daughter Karla (who lives abroad) into an old age home. Once there, Hans faces the draconian management of Matrone van Dussen, a retired jail warden. This forces him to become a rebel and activist, a 90-year-old-man who has nothing to lose by revolting. Ultimately it’s a film about growing old on your own terms. Kicking against ageism and celebrating old age even though death lurks just around the corner.
As a director, I love to redefine genres, mash them together, and produce wholly original stories and characters. As a result, this films exude a certain bizarreness, from the zany characters to the unorthodox situations they find themselves in. They are steeped in a slightly embellished reality, yet full of wild imagination, containing dream sequences, fantasies, and delusions. Camera-wise, I love to mix it up, employing a moving camera, wider lenses with a larger depth of field, accentuated perspective changes, and visual plays between light and darkness.
My big aim as a filmmaker is to bring people together, especially in a diverse country like South Africa, a country with 11 official languages; I believe that comedy is a lubricant to heal pain and show the absurdity of bigotry, stereotypes, and other maladies of society.
Through the insights of a comedy like “Hans steek die Rubicon oor,” the audience can experience new life perspectives that bring us together rather than tear us apart.