Proteus (2003)

Proteus was shot on Robben Island, at the Castle of Good Hope and at other locations in the Cape. Based on a court record found in the Cape archives, dated Thursday 18th August 1735, it tells the story that led to the imprisonment of Dutchman Rijkhaart Jacobz (Neil Sandilands) and Khoi Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown) for “mutually perpetrated sodomy”. The plot also involves Virgil Niven, a Scottish botanist, who was working in the Cape at that time, naming and cultivating the South African protea species. Niven ran a prison garden on Robben Island. The film is a curious and inventive mix, employing anachronisms to comment on the past (distant and recent) and present, our hidden past, and is very clever on the issue of language – who speaks and writes, who has a voice and who has the right to name and describe – flowers, people and crimes…