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Student Oscar Award winner Tristan Holmes is a director and writer for The Fragile King; he tells his story about the making of the film and the challenges they faced.
By Amanda Lou
See the feature film The Fragile King on February 21 @8:30PM at Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street) as part of New York City’s 11th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!
Hailing from Johannesburg, South Africa, Tristan Holmes was brought up a nomad. With a bohemian mother in tow, early life was an undulating tapestry of strange places, people and faces, a complex collection of anthropological opposites unique to a life in Africa.
Co-produced by Catharina Weinek, Dumi Gumbi, and Adam Thal, The Fragile King tells the story of an older white man, Gerald King, who is closer to death than life. His 15 year-old grandson is dumped on Gerald when the child’s mother dies in a drunken car crash. The boy, who barely knows this old man, is shocked into a new reality when he is deposited at Gerald’s flat in Durban by Social Services.
When Holmes first began working on the movie in 2008, it was driven by a desire to reconnect with the time in his life that he would consider the most formative. He had grown up in a family that experienced hardship. He said, “Coming from an unstable home, where the parents were as much children as the children were, my childhood felt never quite secure, as if some other chaos was lurking just around the corner.
My mother was not an alcoholic. She never abandoned me, in fact it was the opposite, but in the chaos of trying to make ends meet I was often left feeling that somehow fixing things was up to me. It was during one of the more trying periods in early life that after a violent breakup, my mother left me with my grandmother and grandfather, until she got back on her feet. I remember carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders, feeling apprehensive when seeing other kids reasonably carefree existences, did they not understand?’”
Part of the film was influenced by Holmes’ relationship to his own grandfather, in which the film tells a homage to him. He adds, “Alone and seemingly abandoned with an erratic, cantankerous chainsmoker, my grandfather seemed like an alien to me when I first arrived. He was a mysterious, enigmatic and mercurial man. To this day I carry images of him sitting on the couch, putting his cigarette into his top shirt pocket with his long fingers, watching the television in statuesque decay. It took a while for him to take an interest in me but when he did he taught me chess, got me to write stories for the first time, and made me give him foot massages. His feet were hideous. For all his faults and there were many, he was the first and really the only man to stick around in my life. My grandfather was the first man I learned to love. This film is for him”.
Catharina was involved in the script development process several years prior to the film being produced. Originally, the film was set in the concrete jungle of Johannesburg without the road trip. Catharina said, “Tristan had a beautiful script to start with and I was there to help finesse and be there for him to bounce ideas off. My commitment to making the film was because I believed in the script and Tristan’s absolute relevance. Not only does it show how a broken old man can still find joy, but it also reflects on how white working class South Africa exists in an urban and rural landscape. In its subtext there is nostalgia for the land but the land is unforgiving. There are no films in South Africa that tell the story of whiteness like this, on how men try and make themselves relevant.” The film itself isn’t a political statement, but rather is how the characters try to make themselves relevant to each other and to create meaning in their lives.
The biggest challenge the team faced was the production aspect, especially money, time, equipment, and distances. They raised money from the South African National Film and Video Foundation, who had seen the value of a brilliantly crafted script and Holmes’ talent. Achieving the look and feel of what he envisioned and the logistics of traveling over 5000km in 4 weeks was extremely difficult, and editing was a huge challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Distances between villages and towns were immense, so it was all about planning but sometimes it was impossible to plan everything in intricate detail. An example of this is, when one village in the desert did not have water. Holmes credits Weinek’s encouragement and support to making the film possible, he said, “There were many times when I just wanted to throw in the towel and I might have if it was not for Cati. In many ways this is her film. She brought it back from the dead, and gently coaxed it to life over many years and saw it to completion. Because she always believed in it. And I think that is the biggest challenge to most films, and definitely this one. To have the audacity, the sheer brazenness to gather a handful of strangers and venture off into uncertainty with the intent to conjure this fictional thing from nothing requires powerful, unrelenting belief.”
The team learned numerous things along the way in their journey to making the film, but what they learned the most was teamwork is everything. Holmes especially learned a lot about who he was and his shortcomings and limits. He said, “In a sense it undid me a little, at a time in life that I needed some undoing. And that was very liberating. I think in many senses those few months of filming and intensity and cold and difficulty and doubt and overcoming left me more vulnerable, less coopted up by the ideas of who I thought I was, and a little more focused on who I actually am, and this is a journey that is ongoing. Practically working with actors, finding solutions to tricky problems, touching those moments of genuine expression and the feeling of family at the edge of the world are powerful and galvanizing, and remind me of what a beautiful thing life can be when you are doing what you love.”
A film as touching and poignant as The Fragile King is worth watching.
Amanda Lou
Amanda Lou is a Fairleigh Dickinson University graduate with a passion for cinema & marketing.
About Winter Film Awards
New York City’s 11th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival runs February 16-25 2023. Check out a jam-packed lineup of 73 fantastic films in all genres from 21 countries, including shorts, features, Animation, Drama, Comedy, Thriller, Horror, Documentary and Music Video. Hollywood might ignore women and people of color, but Winter Film Awards celebrates everyone!
Winter Film Awards is an all-volunteer, minority and women-owned registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 2011 in New York City by a group of filmmakers and enthusiasts. Our mission is to promote diversity, bridge the opportunity divide and provide a platform for under-represented artists and a variety of genres, viewpoints and approaches. We believe that only by seeing others’ stories can we understand each other and only via an open door can the underrepresented artist enter the room.
Winter Film Awards programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Promotional support provided by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment.
For more information about the Festival, please visit winterfilmawards.com
