Venice Horizons Drama ’Carissa’ Probes Traditional Way of Life in Rural South Africa

A traditional way of life in the rural hinterlands of South Africa is put to the test when an upscale development arrives on the region’s doorstep in “Carissa,” the feature debut of writing-directing duo Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar, which premieres Sept. 5 in the Horizons strand of the Venice Film Festival.

The film is set in a small mountain village in South Africa’s Cederberg, where a multinational business conglomerate plans to build a luxury golf estate. To the project’s developers — and to many villagers in the rural community — the resort represents a transformational opportunity that could lift people out of poverty.

But for the film’s titular heroine, played by Gretchen Ramsden, the arrival of Mont Royale presents an impossible choice: Should she head to the city for a chance at a “better” life, or should she stay in the small town of Wupperthal and take over her grandfather’s rooibos farm, which is itself at risk of being wiped off the map once the developers break ground?

“Carissa” is produced by Jacobs and Delmar alongside Deidré Jantjies and Annemarie du Plessis for Cape Town-based Na Aap Prods. The film participated in last year’s Final Cut lab in Venice, where it won the prize for best film in post-production.

Artistic collaborators for the better part of a decade, Jacobs and Delmar say “Carissa” was born out of their travels through the small towns and villages of South Africa’s Cederberg mountains, the story growing “organically out of thousands of hours of conversation” with villagers and community leaders about their hopes and fears for the future, according to Delmar.

“So much of what goes on in the narrative is completely just through conversation and experiences that we had there,” says Jacobs, describing the making of the film as a “deep, ceremonial experience.” “Our people are just natural storytellers… Having spent so much time with them, there was a deeper understanding of how to approach the story.”

Jacobs comes from a village in the arid Namaqualand region near Namibia, while Delmar was raised in the “dreary suburban sprawl” of the capital, Pretoria. “One is a literal desert and the other is a cultural desert,” Delmar says, though he credits the “collision of two different communities that we represent” for helping to forge a “shared synthesis of vision.”

“These [backgrounds] come together in interesting ways. They intersect. They’re the same and they’re different,” he says. He describes their creative process as “leaning into that uncomfortable space, to have conversations that most people, at least in South Africa, would try to avoid” while “learning to get used to the discomfort.”

On its surface, “Carissa” presents what in other hands could have been a simple morality tale of right vs. wrong: the rapacious capitalists devouring everything in their path, including the innocent villagers clinging to an outdated way of life.

But the directors are generous and compassionate in their approach, reflecting on the “tussle between tradition and modernity,” as Delmar frames it, and focusing on the human stakes in the face of what he characterizes as “an unresolvable problem.”

“Carissa” is, by the directors’ own admission, short on easy answers. But they insist its greatest accomplishment is letting the people of Wupperthal wrestle with the hard moral questions for themselves.

“For the people in the film, for them to be able to know that … they are being seen, that they’re being heard, is a massive achievement for all of us,” says Jacobs.