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After spending enough time away from home, Jethro Westraad found his Durban North suburbs’ obsession with safety a little absurd.

He’d come home during the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown and soon realised that his upmarket neighbourhood was always in isolation.

Lifelong neighbours remain incognito behind tall walls outlined by high-voltage electric fences and the gaze of CCTV cameras, while private security guards patrol the perimeters. The only sign of his neighbours’ existence is through the Neighbourhood Crime Watch WhatsApp group, which regularly spirals into a cesspool of paranoia and racial profiling.

Seeing the strangeness in all of this, Jethro set out to make a short documentary about the extremes residents go to to feel safe in upmarket neighbourhoods in South Africa.

Image: Jethro Westraad

Love, Your Neighbour artfully captures the filmmaker’s journey as he attempts to reach out to the people next door, not by knocking on their doors, but through their intercoms, notes IOL:

The documentary showcases a series of interviews conducted via these devices, exploring residents’ dependency on guard dogs, high-security measures, and their attitudes towards the indigenous vervet monkey, which has become an unexpected scapegoat for various community frustrations.

Now the eight-minute doccie has been selected for a World Premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), one of the most renowned documentary festivals globally.

The film is set for its global debut on November 11:

Image: Jethro Westraad

Love, Your Neighbour is said to take a humorous dive into the realities of living in upmarket neighbourhoods in South Africa, becoming “a microcosm of a society grappling with fear and the desire for connection”.

Talking about the documentary, Westraad – who lives between the Netherlands and South Africa – said it all began with his fascination for the pervasive “BEWARE PASOP” signs dotted on all the fences:

“I’ve always stopped to take a photo of the crazy beware, ‘passop’ signs because I find them quite amusing. But I think having that distance living overseas for a year and coming back I realised that this is quite strange. It’s a strange phenomenon. And I wanted to do something around this. So I started to document the tall walls and electric fences,” he said.

What started as a way to kill time during lockdown quickly morphed into this documentary project after a neighbour reached out to him through the intercom while he was spotted taking photos of her fence :

“I said, ‘Hello, I’m your neighbour. I’m just taking a picture of the sign’. And then she said, ‘yeah, what’s funny about it?’ … actually, that was like the spark that made me realise I need to talk to the neighbours through the intercom …”

Image: Jethro Westraad

“The symbol of an intercom in South Africa, is like a suburban bouncer. It’s just a normal tool here in Europe, you know, using it to get in and out of places. But in South Africa, it’s like the way that you vet people. You can check – what kind of person am I dealing with here?” Westraad said.

The film is supposed to be a satirical look at suburban life, which Jethro says he is well aware he is a part of: “I was also including myself in the film, you know, in kind of a way that I’m not immune to the suburbs,” he said.

 

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Keep an eye out for Love, Your Neighbour through Jethro’s various social media pages, here, here and here.

[source:iol]