DIFF26 | From Dust We Spin | dir: Julia Jansch | 85mins
SC8 | Friday 31st July | 7pm
Waaabap-bap-bap. A story as old as time. Sometimes you just want to donut until your tyres come off, and the government won't let you.
From Dust We Spin is a much bigger film than just that. Julia Jansch manages to tell the story of all the intersecting issues around a father just wanting to find a pitch where his daughter can pull an ag, without making it about all the intersecting issues.
Bookended with a spinning pro reciting a sort of street poetry about the sport, its history and future is such a Cape Town move, it's impossible not to love the makeshift nature of the whole sport and everything that that makeshift nature says about what it means to live on the flats.
Logan is a young girl from the plein, her father wants her to spin, to compete in the car spinning events that have long been illegal in South Africa, her mother is worried about safety. The spinning fraternity is working toward legitimacy, the government is making promises. A father just wants his daughter to find an outlet for her frustrations, and spinning is what he knows.
Spinning as a sport struggles with safety issues, and having regulated pitches could help with this. The Department of Sports, Arts and Culture is shown to be doing something, but nothing really comes of this narratively. Logan's father confronts the organisers of legal events in one scene, frustrated with the time it takes to pull an event together, yet there is no real accumulation of frustration, at times coming across as helicopter filmmaking.
Everything builds to that final event, you seldom feel the weight of the systemic oppression around this sport. But it is visible in every frame. To an outside viewer, this might feel thin, but its hyperlocal nature is the very heart of it. From Dust We Spin avoids all the traps that come with trying to explain this shit to outsiders.
There are two moments in From Dust We Spin that are pure storytelling craft. The cut directly after the most epic slow-motion spin: Eddie Rasta leaping off the running board of his car mid-donut, enveloped in smoke, like some ancient god returning victorious. And then at the film's climax, Busby Berkeley meets the Cape Flats, one of the most earned top shots in recent film history.
Waaabap-bap-bap.