The Storekeeper

Gavin Hood's THE STOREKEEPER is a mini-masterpiece of filmmaking, a film short with no dialogue, yet with very moving characters, whose facial expressions and body language make the short work. A storekeeper in South Africa goes to extreme lengths to keep from being repeatedly burglarized. We know exactly what'll happen as the story progresses, yet we're powerless to stop it.

The Storekeeper is a highly underrated short from South Africa that I was lucky enough to catch at the NZ film festival this year. Superbly and simply directed without dialogue, it is a powerful and intense anti-violence statement and a minor masterpiece. Catch it if you can.

When we are told "show don't tell," this movie demonstrates what that means.

Director/writer Gavin Hood shows us the who, what, where, when and how in a community. Since this is a movie, the pretext is "something is going to happen." The context is a sparse community somewhere. The subtext is the title of this review, a quote from Ayi Kwei Armah. Who could have predicted the ending?

The ending tells us the monster the storekeeper built to protect his shop doesn't discriminate. Like any system it does what it was designed to do. That monster did its job ruthlessly and with heart wrenching consequences. Just as in Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein, the monster ended up destroying its maker.

What I liked most about this short film is since there is no dialogue, we can take this same story, set it anywhere on the planet, and it will have the same effect.

All that and I haven't even watched Tsotsi, yet.

The Storekeeper, set in South Africa, is a brilliant short film depicting the lengths one storekeeper had to go to in order to keep his business safe from thieves. However, there are tragic consequences to his methods. I truly believe Gavin Hood did an astonishing job with this film.

An elderly man owns a small convenience store in rural South Africa. He has not much stock and doesn't take much money but what he has is his and he tries to protect it the best he can. However one robbery continually tries to steal from him no matter what steps he takes to protect against it.

On the DVD for Tsotsi, this short film has a very clear message that greeting aggression with more aggression is not going to solve anything in even the short or even long term. It is a simple message and indeed it is delivered within quite a simple short film. This will perhaps annoy some viewers and it is a weakness that the message is so obviously played out. I suppose this was unavoidable given the way the story goes but in credit to Hood the subtly he lacks here as writer he has as director. Without any dialogue the film uses the actors' faces and bodies really well to convey emotion and it is expertly shot throughout, having a good sense of place to it that doesn't do down the area or gloss it up like some films will do with "wilderness" type settings.

Overall then a simplistic short film but it still manages to be engaging despite the rather basic message being ultimately delivered in a rather obvious way. However Hood makes up for his writing with his direction, which is roundly good.