Robyn Phillips’ directorial debut, ‘Seasons of Longing’ is a speculative biopic of South African photographer, Irene ‘Freddie’ Heseltine (1892-1980) and her life partner, Anna Petronella ‘Nell’ van Heerden (1887-1975). The 16-minute short film traces the love story of Frances and Niccy, depicted as younger versions of Heseltine and Van Heerden, respectively. The film is sequenced according to a selection of photographs taken by Heseltine in the mid-1930s on predominantly rural farmlands from their travels around South Africa. These photographs were recently uncovered from the Pitt Rivers Museum (UK) photographic archive, where film producer Anna Sephton is a collaborative Doctoral programme student. Phillips and Sephton chose to tell a love story of the two South African lesbian figures through a series of speculative glimpses into the women’s lives before and after each photograph was taken. The film was shot on Sephton’s family farm, Pitlochrie Farm, bordering Lesotho in the Eastern Cape, with a cast and crew of South African, Zimbabwean, Nigerian and Swedish talent.
The film opens with a wide shot of dull golden flatlands, tufts of dry bush populate the expansive plane on which we first encounter the two protagonists, Frances and Niccy, as tiny figures trekking in the distance. The women playfully orbit around one another in the cold winter sun synonymous with the arid winters of landlocked regions through the Eastern Cape up towards Gauteng. The scene tracks the two to a body of water, into which a barefoot Niccy, played by Inez Robertson, wades with her ‘men’s’ pants bunched up to her thighs. We see Frances, a lithe blonde with translucent blue eyes, portrayed by Meghan Oberholzer, draw the camera to her gaze and take a considered shot of her lover from behind. The moving image transitions seamlessly into the first of six original black-and-white photographs on which the film’s narrative is sequentially based. The film is graded in muted golds, browns, tans and silvers, the wider landscape shots affect the flatness of a photographic image, which I read as a reference to the photographic archive on which the film is based.
As her first written and directed film, I was impressed with Phillips’ ease of command of the discipline. She relays that this project was of particular interest to her as a queer-identifying person living in Cape Town today, as she can strongly relate to the pressure of masking her sexual identity in public as a form of self-preservation within a largely heteronormative South African society. Impassioned by this project, Phillips appealed to some of the local film industry’s finest talents to work with her on a shoestring budget with limited resources. Producer and friend, Nana Anazodo put a team of local talent together while Phillips personally recruited cinematographer Jason Prins for the film. Prins is young but already internationally celebrated for his work; his cinematic gaze is easily recognised in the film for the nuances of depth and framing of his shots, which at times out-shine the original photographs on which they are based. For example, a scene of Niccy walking into the woods accompanied by two Great Danes is just beautifully shot; tall trees loom above as though the viewer were buried and revived floating in the woods behind her as the POV switches to Frances’ camera’s viewfinder. I would have liked the schisms between moving images and archival photographs to have been more consciously engaged with, perhaps as a reflection on the archive as an impossible rendering of real life and further, on the film’s fictionalising of the lived experiences of the people whose likeness is represented in the images.
The film portrays elements of domestic farm life in the years preceding the Apartheid era; reference is made to two Sotho women working as domestic labourers in the house as they go about setting their employer’s dinner table for the evening ahead, they are portrayed by Ntseiseng Tsekoa and Maletsatsi Mthakathi. While this kind of representation reflects the racial-labour dynamics of this period in time, it is still a prevalent image in South Africa today. It is known that Van Heerden, on whom Niccy’s character is based, was a member of the Apartheid National Party on and off throughout her life, while she also identified as a socialist and a suffragette; she was nonetheless a privileged white subject to the Apartheid regime. I can appreciate that it is challenging to depict the grossly oppressive social conditions of black life simultaneously while trying to tell a story of love between two white women during the Apartheid era. Phillips expresses that she was painfully aware of the complexities of telling a white love story against the backdrop of Apartheid and that she made an effort to shift the film’s focus to a narrative that is more broadly relatable to contemporary urban life in South Africa; of not feeling seen or accepted in one’s social environment. She further shares that her reading of the film is less so romantic and more an expression of kinship with Heseltine and Van Heerden, who, even in their most intimate photographs – none of which show actual physical intimacy between the two – would have had to conceal the nature of their romantic relationship to the public at the time.
The film oscillates between scenes of Frances and Niccy in ‘public’ life, which is ironically set inside the farmhouse within the context of Frances’ immediate nuclear family and, the lovers’ private life which, by contrast, unfolds in the expansive natural landscape surrounding the farm. I enjoyed that their most intimate moments are depicted near bodies of water, as can be seen in Heseltine’s original playful nude self-portrait of herself and Van Heerden; in comparison to the moments when the two characters are within the house and consigned to normative gender roles and strict social decorum. The director makes a nod to Niccy as a woman who was exempt from certain gender-based social cues, as is well-known about Nell van Heerden, a woman doctor famous for wearing ‘men’s pantsuits.
‘Seasons of Longing’ draws to an end in a family portrait scene in the living room, in which an older matriarch directs Maletsatsi to take the large family’s portrait, Niccy is also present for the portrait and, before Maletsatsi takes the shot, Frances is directed to stand next to Niccy for better composition. Clearly, the family does not suspect a romantic connection between the two. Frances and Niccy slowly reach for each other’s hands in a tender embrace, the film screen fades to black and we hear the camera shutter click. We never see the family portrait in which I imagine Niccy and Frances can be seen holding hands; one is only left to speculate on whether this gesture is a coming out for them or a stolen moment of intimacy before the camera, the sole witness of Freddie Heseltine and Nell van Heerden’s intimate relationship.
During the film’s brief Q&A session at the Cape Town Labia Theatre premiere, I wanted to hear Sephton unpack more about the actual women on whose lives the film is loosely based. Sephton’s PhD research project at the University of Brighton is in part informed by the unearthing of Freddie Heseltine’s archive. Heseltine’s photographs serve as a primary source for Sephton in piecing together Heseltine’s life within the broader project of attempting to animate complex colonial archives within a contemporary South African setting. Over an hour-long phone call with Sephton, I came to understand the particular challenges that this research project presented for her – a South African-born UK resident. Specifically, Sephton chewed on the question of what ties her to her chosen subject. As we spoke, it became clear to me that Sephton is deeply connected to Heseltine as she has brought attention to the value of Hesteltine’s images to South African discourse around lesbian and queer narratives. Sephton found Heseltine’s negatives amongst a collection that was donated by the children of Heseltine’s nephew, Bryan Heseltine. Bryan is himself an increasingly relevant South African photographer of the early Apartheid era. His work was shown in South Africa for the first time since his departure from the country in 1952 with the exhibition, ‘Going and Coming Back: Photographs of 1950s Cape Town’ at the District Six Museum in 2014. His portraits of the daily lives of black and coloured South Africans living in Bo Kaap, District Six, Langa, Nyanga and Windermere offer more personable and also lesser documented narratives of life under Apartheid “beyond the documentation of political struggle that dominated the 1980s and 1990s” (District Six Exhibition text). Sephton explains, “It was casually assumed she (Freddie) might have been his (Bryan’s) photographic tutor”, which may be the reason as to why her photographic negatives were included with his donated work. While developing Freddie Heseltine’s negatives, Sephton increasingly took note of her images, which she describes as “a visual collision of familiar colonial tropes and the unexpected core of the collection: the magnetic gaze between Freddie and her life partner, Petronella ‘Nell’ Van Heerden” (Pitt Rivers Museum website). Intrigued by her findings, Sephton resolved to shift the focus of her research from Bryan to his aunt. I speculate that Freddie’s role as Bryan’s mentor indicates that her political allegiances were potentially also left-leaning, which makes her a further interesting subject in the context of her relationship with Van Heerden, who re-joined the Apartheid National Party in the 1960s.
Van Heerden is historically revered as the first medical doctor to write a doctoral thesis in Afrikaans (1927), she was also a politician, author, archaeologist and cattle farmer later on in life. Very little has been recorded about Heseltine’s life in comparison to Van Heerden, who further published two memoirs regarded as lesbian-feminist-coded literary works (Smit. L. ‘Speaking and Silence in the memories of Petronella van Heerden’ Literator vol.38 n.1 Mafikeng 2017). By comparison, Heseltine’s death date is unknown; it would appear that her legacy is historically tied to that of Van Heerden as her life partner. If it weren’t for Sephton, Heseltine’s images would not have been revived from a British museum collection and returned to their place of origin. While it is a challenge to piece together the autobiography of a largely unknown lesbian photographer of the early Apartheid era; it is a noble cause. Further, I think it is possible for filmmakers to be inspired by people but to be selective about how to tell their stories, which are often complex and contradictory, as can be seen in the dualities of Nell van Heerden’s defiant character as a renegade Afrikaans feminist, retired lesbian farmer and member of the Apartheid National Party. Sephton relays that the film was for her an endeavour to “engage in creative, collaborative efforts that prioritise the desires and lived experiences of a young, queer South African community.”
Producer Anazodo rallied together a remarkable cast and crew of young local and international talent to tell the story of a love that could not see the light of day. This narrative clearly resonated with the team of thirty-two cast and crew members, some of whom were local shepherds and farmers from the region, seeing as most contributions by established industry professionals were made in kind. The film’s Cape Town premiere was sold out with overwhelming responses from audience members who received it with open curiosity. Burning questions about Heseltine and Van Heerden’s actual lives and, the dilemma of South African archives being held by British museums affirmed an active engagement with the complexity of how to frame stories from our collective past. However fragmented and contradictory, stories such as that of Heseltine and Van Heerden can help to navigate the post-Apartheid minefield, not just with a necessary self-reflexive scrutiny but also with a sense of self-compassion. ‘Seasons of Longing’ offers a considered moment for us to see our own narratives reflected in the lives of those who came before us.
