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INDEX : Film A - Z | PROTEUS | ||||||||||
TITLE: PROTEUS | ||||||||||
DIRECTOR: John Greyson and Jack Lewis | ||||||||||
PRODUCER: Big World Cinema, Pluck Productions in association with Idol Pictures. | ||||||||||
SYNOPSIS: In 1725, a young Khoi herder Claas Blank
is sentenced to hard labour on Robben Island, Cape Town's penal colony.
The prison garden is run by Virgil Tyne, an English botanist who is naming
and cultivating South African protea species for the European market.
Tyne is entranced by the quick-witted Blank, and the youth soon finds
ways to manipulate the repressed botanist, exchanging native lore for
guilders and favours. |
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Blank works alongside a Dutch sailor, Rijkhaart Jacobsz,
who is serving time for sodomy. Despite mutual prejudices, the two prisoners
are strongly attracted to eachother and begin a tentative affair, accidentally
witnessed by Tyne. Their affair transgresses vast cultural taboos, and
unleashes confused feelings of desire and jealousy that neither have a
name for. Tyne returns to Amsterdam, but he and Blankare obsessed with
each other, constructing fantasies about their lives from the few scraps
they've gleaned. |
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A decade passes, and the prison authorities continue
to ignore the ongoing 'friendship' of Blank and Jacobsz. Then Tyne returns
to the Cape, fleeing a sodomy scandal in Amsterdam, where 70 men (including
his partner Ourens) were tried and garrotted in the city square. His return
is catastrophic, inadvertently triggering the arrest of Blank and Jacobsz
on sodomy charges. Tyne makes a desperate intervention to the court, intent
on saving Blank, but the herder refuses to play along. For the first time
in his life, Blank tells the truth -- for the first time he names his
feelings for the Dutch sailor. |
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Based on a true story. | Photos, Downloads, Extras > | ||||||||||
2003 | 103 minutes | colour | 35 mm | English original version |
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