Umshini Wam

Bring Me My Machine Gun

This short film is a collaboration between writer/director Harmony Korine (who penned the controversial film Kids before he was twenty) and South African artists Ninja and Yo Londi, known together as Die Antwoord (The Answer) This is a story about making next level shit, upward mobility, and then ultimately love. The two characters roll onto screen while an opening dialogue from Yo Londi lays out the direction of the plot. "...It's time to get the fucking respect we deserve...If we want to be next level, we have to role next level." Several ideas can be drawn from this film. The structure of the plot explores ideas of class separation. This could reference the social structure within South Africa, or even the relationship of South African's to the rest of the world.

On the other hand we could explore this idea of 'the other' that's always excellently exploited in Korine's work as well as in Die Antwoord's. This specific piece is being shown largely to people who are unaware of South African culture. I for one fit into that group of people. These artists work in that cloud of the unknown to create their own representation of South Africa and possibly comment on that. I believe what they're doing is utilizing their position to create a sense of 'the strange' and a sort of poetry that speaks in universal terms despite it's absurdity.

What's most charming about this film is the relationship between Ninja and Yo Londi. The fact that they exist in a world that's unique to them, both in the world of the story and in relation to us, highlights how much these two need and rely on each other. Somehow in its absurdist fashion, this film manages to evoke a level of emotion and understanding of the human condition that can't be captured by most films that strive for realism. This is what chiefly interests me about this film: it's exploration of the strange and use of allegory to make articulate something that can be widely appreciated as beautiful.