Film "A Lucky Man"

February 11 2012, 07 PM

Gordon Clark ( Südafrika), _{"A Lucky Man"}

Followed by a round table talk
Ernie Solomon, Gordon Clark (director) and Mark Fyfe (producer)

watch the trailer

A Lucky Man” is a morality story in which the perplexing issues of identity and morality are played out in the life of a man  literally living on the edge. Born into a family where he is an outsider and growing up in a city and country in which he is a member of a community deemed neither white nor black, Ernie ‘Lastig’ Solomon sets out on a road fraught with crime, violence and abuse in search of himself and a place he can call home. It is the universal tale of humanity:  the longing for belonging.

Set in the impoverished Cape Flats, a peri-urban sprawl on the periphery of one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Cape Town,” A Lucky Man” traces  the story of Ernie’s search for identity and meaning as it takes him on a road in which he collides with both family and society. He becomes the ultimate outcast, a bastard son and a criminal. For such a one there is but one home, prison, the ‘Big House’, the inevitable destination ………

Ernie’s quest for identity brings out an inventive propensity for self- creation, assuming identities at will which, through a mixture of cunning and luck, enable him to survive. But Ernie is driven by an irresistible quest for his real self and trusts his own instincts to take him beyond mere survival. Ernie ‘Lastig’ (‘nuisance’) Solomon’s  is unable to escape the ‘nuisance ‘of his self-badgering: to know himself  and to be known for who he is.

“A Lucky Man” avoids both the glamourization and the sensationalization of the lives of people for whom a life of crime is not a choice but an often inevitable response to the living in a society in which circumstances and fate are not of their choosing nor making. It is not an apologia attempting to solicit sympathy. It simply asks the question: Given the same circumstances dished out by fate, having to watch your back as you pursued your search for your sense of self, for your intrinsic sense of belonging, what would you do? Would you consider yourself ‘lucky man’ to have survived yet alone learned to live and fulfilled the longing to belong?