![]() ![]() Unfortunately, while this brilliant artful endeavour has made an attention-grabbing splash, it’s so alienating that you could easily justify screening the film on loop in an art museum. The auteur’s sheer audacity or self-indulgence has definitely made an impression with Time spent with cats is never wasted making official selection at film festivals around the world. Given these provocative yet constraining elements, this is an incredibly bold feature film debut by Clive Will. This is about as niche as it gets when it comes to art film: black-and-white, closing in on 3 hours, a “foreign” language (Xhosa), set in Africa, sparsely scripted, deliberately slow-moving, coarse language and featuring naturalistic performances with some disturbing imagery. A curious piece of performance art, it sets the scene for Time spent with cats is never wasted, “stage fright” mistakes and all. ![]() The film starts with an extended long shot of a desert landscape with an abandoned tricycle as a drummie troupe follows an old sedan with a speaker mounted on its roof until they march past. The difference being that this portrait’s fluidity and surreal dimension transcend the hard reality to sink into a more poetic paradigm. Being South African, the contemplative, earthy, seemingly mundane, moody photography has political undertones and reverberates the transportive work of the late David Goldblatt. Every shot is an artwork, rich in symbolism and vividly photographed to tell a story within a story. It’s a visual masterpiece, transforming South Africa’s Northern Cape region into a bleak, dusty and otherworldly place of rich contrasts, surreal majesty and political poetry. While shot in colour, Time spent with cats is never wasted was always intended to be released as a black-and-white art film. Losing his job at an abattoir and shunned from his community, Joe’s forced to drag his creation into the wilderness. Drawing the derision of locals, who think his structure is designed to enable him to fly, their suspicion turns into envy when a serious art buyer wants to make an offer. Joe constructs a life-size helicopter using abandoned items from his village and the surrounding wilderness. Having taken 3 years to shoot and a year to edit, this epic art odyssey represents an arduous undertaking – one reflected in the journey of the found objects artist at its core. ![]() Shot in the Northern Cape during one of its worst droughts, the landscape is dry, harsh and barren with an air of suffering. Time spent with cats is never wasted also known as Ixesha elichithwe neekati aliyo ncitha xesha is a black-and-white art drama from writer-director Clive Will. ![]()
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