Cape of Good Hope

The lives of three women are transformed working at a Cape Town animal rescue shelter in a profoundly optimistic film that arrives on the tenth anniversary of the end of Apartheid. Cape of Good Hope reveals the new South Africa in a vibrant and colorful mosaic of love and hope.

In the tradition of such rich, multi-layered films as Ang Lee’s Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, and Robert Altman and John Sayles’s sociological slice-of-life pictures, Cape of Good Hope beautifully interweaves a number of storylines, all revolving around a Cape Town animal rescue shelter.
The faces of Hope are: Jean Claude (Eriq Ebouaney of Raoul Peck’s award-winning film, Lumumba), a refugee from war-torn Congo who finds himself torn between love and the promise of asylum in the West; Lindiwe (Nthati Moshesh), a single mother and housekeeper trying to make a life for herself and her son while finding a way out of the township once and for all; Sharifa (Quanita Adams) and Habib (David Isaacs), a young Muslim couple unable to have children of their own yet desperate to have a family; Morne (Morne Visser), a recently widowed vet who wants to believe that true love can strike twice; and Kate (Debbie Brown), the emotionally guarded founder of the animal shelter, who seems to relate better to stray dogs than to people.

Cape of Good Hope is the first feature film written and directed by Mark Bamford—award-winning director of the short film, Hero—along with his wife, co-writer and producing partner, Suzanne Kay. Themselves recent transplants to South Africa, the couple found inspiration for Cape of Good Hope through their experiences working as volunteers with children and refugees.

Filmed entirely on location in the Cape Town coastal community of Hout Bay, and cast solely with African actors, Cape of Good Hope substitutes a hard-won, deeply felt sense of humanism for the clichés and political bombast audiences are familiar with from many films set in Africa.