The word “Spoor” means “trace” in Afrikaans, and our film, Spoor, is about the traces that trauma leaves as it is silently transmitted from generation to generation. Without knowing how or why, we are all affected by the experiences of our ancestors and recreate their worlds.

 

For Ash, these are specifically the lingering effects of Indentured Labour and Apartheid on South African Indians and their descendants, an under-explored topic in the history of the British Empire, and which has been largely neglected by the British mainstream media.

 

But the film is also a universal parable about feeling unable to leave the rules of childhood behind, and being trapped in a mental world that is dominated by a repetitive and dying inner voice.

 

We believe that fables are an effective way of exploring these aspects of life because the metaphor can be explicit. In this case, the tape in the body expresses how we record events from the past and experience them as physical pain. It is only when we can bear to listen to that pain and understand it that we can send it back to where it came from and free ourselves.

 

We used lurid colours to suggest that the story takes place in a fairytale world of the mind, and to show Ash’s alienation and reflect the disharmony of her spirit. For similar reasons, our composer Jon Opstad created distorted and discordant music, much of it using reel-to-reel tape effects in reference to the audio tape that spews out of Ash. We hope that this subconscious connection between the music and the imagery creates an uncanny feeling that transmits the protagonist’s unease to the audience.

 

We used violent, primal imagery in order to override the rational mind and reach into a transcendent realm. For this reason we also included the Hindu goddess, Kali, as the guiding spirit of the film. She represents transformation and destroys the old in order to nurture the new, and for this reason is often referred to in religious texts as Kali Ma – the true mother.