BEST ACTRESS – Feature or Short

Tarryn Wynhaard ("Anna")

POU (PEACOCK)

(South Africa, 90 min, 2022)

A feature film directorial debut by Jaco Minnaar, starring Tarryn Wyngaard and Johan Botha, Pou centers on a woman who’s banished from a puritanical organization and forced to care for one of its founding members at an isolated farmhouse. From a strict boarding school environment, Anna’s thrust into the open spaces of an old farm to nurse ailing and disturbed Apartheid-era theologian. There to serve out a punishment for her flagrant disregard for the organization’s rules and be taken in hand by a man struggling to come to terms with his own demons, things devolve as a slow burning standoff between the new and old. This is what one would describe as elevated horror, an atmospheric film that delves into the dark recesses of the Afrikaner psyche, tipping the hat to the work of David Lynch, Ari Aster, and Robert Eggers in composing this eerie, unsettling, and stylish gothic horror.

In Afrikaans with English subtitles

Director Biography - Jaco Minnaar

Jaco grew up in the industrial wastelands of Gauteng. He studied film and literature at University and later went to film school. He’s worked many different jobs from cleaning toilets to lecturing to directing for television. He made various experimental video works, music videos and short films that includes Die Onderspit for kykNET’s Silwerskermfees which he made along with David Cornwell. Pou is his first feature film.