The Trek

“What if the land, no longer passive, could rise and write its own history?” This question, intoned in Khoekhoegowab by an unseen witness, opens the debut feature from South African cinematographer Meekaaeel Adam, and sets the scene for what’s to come. In the mid-19th century, a family of Dutch-Afrikaans homesteaders sets out to cross the inhospitable terrain of the Kalahari Desert along with their backer, a boorish Brit whose avarice and bigotry loom large over the journey. Faced with the threat of starvation and a dwindling water supply, they join forces with a taciturn Khoen stranger, though his presence does little to relieve the family’s growing unease at the sense that something potent and sinister lurks in wait. Drawing inspiration from the evocative motifs of traditional folklore, Adam unspools this “Western-horror” parable against the austere, otherworldly landscape of South Africa’s rugged Northern Cape, the perfect backdrop for a haunting, haunted meditation on the brutal legacies of settler colonialism.