The Student Academy Awards is an annual competition conducted by the Academy and the Academy Foundation. The Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater plays host to the very popular awards ceremony, which is held in the beginning of June.
Every year, over 500 film schools and universities across the US enter works to be judged in the following four categories: Animation, Documentary, Narrative and Alternative. Added to these is an award which honours a film outside of the US, contested worldwide by all CILECT member film schools. AFDA is a previous winner of this award in 2006 with the multiple award-winning honours film Elalini.
This year's South African entry was completed in 2007 and as an AFDA honours graduate film scooped up 10 awards at the AFDA Johannesburg film awards which included Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor to name a few. The film premiered in November 2007 at the AFDA film festival to a capacity audience and received one of the highest audience response ratings in the school's history.
The South African entry was written and directed by Brandon Oelofse. It tells the story of Fourie (HO Meyer), a young Afrikaans man who, after the loss of his father, sets out on a journey from Johannesburg to Cape Town to throw his father's ashes off the edge of the Cape Point. Along the way he discovers the true sense of the man his father was, and by confronting the past, ultimately finds his future in the process.
The film is a meditation on the current identities that have emerged out of and into the transition towards the new South Africa, focusing in and around the psyche of the white Afrikaans male and all that it represents in the context of the past, present and future of SA.
The narrative uses a number of devices: the classic American Western, the road movie and the parallel narrative (past and present) to guide its translation, meaning and style. It is intended to be a comment on the marginalisation of a previously favoured group that has lost its way and seeks to find identity.
Through the narrative the journey is a reversal of the Groot Trek legacy from Cape Town to Johannesburg, in essence redefining the identity of the Afrikaner youth.
The team behind the film consists of producer Peter Adolphs, producer Anthonie van der Walt, writer/director Brandon Oelofse, DOP Brad Devine, editor Jan C Botha, sound designer Chris van der Walt, and production designer Carrie-Ann Daly. The film stars HO Meyer as Fourie, Terri Ann Eckstein as Carla, Hayleigh Evans as Jana, Tarryn Lee Cockcroft, Lochner de Kock and Natalia de Rocher.
