Braaim is a gang leader torn between securing the future of his young family while guiding his men through a deadly drug turf war. What choices will he make?
The film is set in a world where conflicting forces are struggling to regulate the illicit drug supply market among the working class communities of the Cape Flats in Cape Town, an area infamous for one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Our main character, Braaim, is a gang leader navigating a violent and conflicted physical and psychological landscape, one in which honour and betrayal are all too often two sides of the same coin.
On the one side is his young family, and on the other, heavily armed foot soldiers. Emotional pressure from his wife to lead a normal life is mounting, and Braaim is torn between securing the future of his young family while guiding his men through a deadly drug turf war. What choices will he make?
The film becomes an intimate portrayal of one gang leader and his young family in a community where there are thousands of heavily armed individuals hoping to achieve the same goals in life.
This cinéma vérité film draws the audience into the claustrophobia of a drug den contrasted with the dangerous chaos of the streets. The film unpacks a meditation on the nature of free choice versus social entrapment, creating startling insights into a world that will surprise the viewer into questioning their own preconceptions about the complex relationships between violence, poverty, honour, love and free choice.
The Devil’s Lair premiered at HotDocs Festival 2013
Screening
The film will screen in Amsterdam on 21 December 2013. Find out more
Press
A captivatingly impressive documentary that’s hard to look away from – Pretty Clever Films
One of the most anticipated films of 2013 – Screen Africa, February 2013
An absolutely terrifying and striking vérité look inside the day to day life of a South African drug runner and gang-leader, director Riaan Hendricks takes viewers closer to the inside of a drug den than they probably ever dreamed of getting. This film is the definition of the “real deal” – Andrew Parker, Criticize This
Intimate, unguarded and very real, The Devil’s Lair is tense in ways fiction can’t replicate; when you hear gunfire here, the awareness that somebody’s life is actually in danger is impossible to escape – Scott A Gray, Exclaim
