If An Octopus Could Palm (17:00) - Cinema 3 - 16 L

If An Octopus Could Palm

Lerumo, a young adult, looked at his future with optimism until the loss of his father, Tshepo, whereupon his life came to a lonely halt. A year later, he decides to begin a search for a rumoured wish-granting totem buried within a remote valley. His wish? To have a final word with his father. He brings two somewhat estranged high school friends, Alex and Thili, to try quelling his loneliness. Their presence comes with its own problems, though. Alex, who does a poor job at hiding his own insecurities, scrutinises Lerumo’s wish. And Thili can neither fully back Alex’s scepticism nor Lerumo’s credulity regarding the totem. When the men fail to find the totem in the exact spot it’s rumoured to be, Lerumo demands that they carry on searching despite no longer having a landmark to look for. The uncertainty culminates in a bitter second night where Alex reveals that neither he nor Thili believe in the totem’s existence, and that they only came for Lerumo. Thili insists that he’s since changed his mind, but it isn’t enough to sustain the group: Alex abandons the search the next morning. Both mortified and outraged, Lerumo resigns himself to quitting the search, too. But by connecting spatial clues from the past two days of journeying, Lerumo wonders whether the totem could’ve been moved before he and the others arrived. That morning, he reluctantly brings Thili with him to where he suspects the totem is buried, and there they find it. Using it transports Lerumo’s consciousness to a past event held in memory by his father. However, it’s a version of his father he’d never seen before: sad, weary, resigned. Tshepo’s cell phone rings. He answers the call, and from the phone comes Lerumo’s voice. This Lerumo asks Tshepo how he’s meant to be a man in spite of feeling incapable, whereupon Tshepo recognises that Lerumo is trying to be a man by someone else’s standards, not his own. Tshepo asserts that living in the shadows of others makes for a hollow, submissive life. Lerumo then comes to as and where he was in the valley. The film ends on a funereally charged image of Lerumo washing his hands in a river.

Saturday, 21 November 2026 · 17:00 · Cinema 3 · Age rating: 16 L

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